The ATO issued Practice Statement PS LA 2025/2, outlining the Commissioner’s administrative approach to granting full or partial exemptions from Public country-by-country reporting requirements for a given reporting period.
The Australian Taxation Office published Practice Statement Law Administration PS LA 2025/2, Public country-by-country reporting exemptions, on 8 December 2025. The statement sets out the administrative approach to the Commissioner’s discretion for granting a full or partial exemption from Public country-by-country reporting obligations for a reporting period.
ATO has considered the feedback received during consultation and made some changes to the practice statement, and also published a compendium detailing all issues raised and their response to each.
Entities have begun lodging exemption applications. The ATO encourages any entities seeking an exemption to register and submit an application well before the reporting deadline to give them sufficient time to consider the request. The ATO will also offer an early engagement service if clients would like to discuss their circumstances before lodging a formal exemption application.
In addition to this practice statement, there are ongoing discussions about the possibility of class exemptions for some entities.
Practice Statement Law Administration
PS LA 2025/2
What this Practice Statement is about
Multinational entities subject to the Public country-by-country (CBC) reporting regime must publish selected tax information for Australia, specified countries and the remainder of their global operations.
Reporting obligations apply to Public CBC entities for reporting periods commencing on or after 1 July 2024, unless they have been granted an exemption.
This Practice Statement provides context about the obligations imposed by the Public CBC reporting regime and guidance on the authority the law provides to the Commissioner to exempt an entity from those obligations under subsection 3DB(5) or (6) of the Taxation Administration Act 1953 (TAA).
The Public CBC reporting regime is separate from, and additional to, the reporting requirements imposed by Subdivision 815-E of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (ITAA 1997), which is sometimes called private or confidential CBC. Private CBC obligations apply to income years starting on or after 1 January 2016.
Scope of this Practice Statement
This Practice Statement outlines:
- Background on the Public CBC reporting regime and exemptions
- Considerations relevant to exercising the discretion
- The process for seeking an exemption from Public CBC reporting obligations
- The information that reporting entities (applicants) should provide with the exemption application
- Guidance about timeframes and review options.
Background to the Public CBC reporting regime
Entities within the Public CBC reporting regime
The Public CBC reporting regime applies to an entity (reporting entity) if:
- It is a constitutional corporation, a partnership (in which each partner is a constitutional corporation), or a trust (of which each trustee is a constitutional corporation)
- It is a member of a CBC reporting group at any time during the reporting period (that is, a group consolidated for accounting purposes as a single group or a notional listed company group), and
- During the previous reporting period, it was a “CBC reporting parent” (an entity with annual global income for the period of AUD 1 billion or more, which was not controlled by another group member).
If a subsidiary of a global group is not included in its global parent entity’s consolidated financial statements, it may not meet the membership requirement[ of that group and therefore may not be within that group’s Public CBC reporting obligations. However, the entity may still be subject to the Public CBC reporting regime if it qualifies separately (that is, it has sufficient annual global income and meets the other requirements).
When Public CBC reporting obligations apply
A reporting entity has Public CBC reporting obligations for a period if the following requirements are met in that period:
- They, or a member of their CBC reporting group, are an Australian resident or a foreign resident operating an Australian permanent establishment
- Their aggregated turnover for the reporting period includes Australian-sourced income of AUD 10 million or more, and
- They do not have a full exemption.
