Internal ATO procedures regarding vacancy fee waiver requests – deemed returns

Written by Claude Haiku 5.5 from the extracted text on 14 Oct 2026. It can miss or misread redacted and scanned pages. Check the source before relying on it.

This release is an internal ATO procedures template, version 1.9 dated 22 November 2023, setting out how EL1 technical staff assess requests to waive the foreign investment vacancy fee where the liability arose from a "deemed" vacancy fee return, meaning the foreign owner failed to lodge a return. The procedure runs through six tasks: checking the request and work management activity, confirming client details in ICP, assessing the lodgement year against the vacancy fee waiver policy, weighing evidence of residential occupation, deciding the waiver, and recording the outcome in the vacancy fee spreadsheet. Related material includes a Law and Policy Position Paper dated August 2026, decision templates, call centre and correspondence scripts, and a delegation table. Fragments of the excerpt are heavily redacted and partly garbled. No revenue or case volume figures are visible.