Where is my refund?

The most popular question from every tax season is: “WHERE IS MY REFUND?” 

It is a great time now to discuss how we process your refund and what is the estimated timeframe for the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to process your refund. 

Refund Process

• Lodge tax return: After you have lodged your tax return through our system. It will then automatically lodge your tax return to the ATO.
• Processing time: The ATO will then process your tax return. The usual estimated processing time is between 14- 21 business days. From the last tax season, 8 out of 10 tax returns were received faster than we expected, within only 10 business days!  
• Trust Account: The ATO will transfer your refunds into our trust account. We will then do a direct deposit into your bank account on the next business day after deducting our accounting fees.
• Direct Deposit: It can take up to 1-2 business days, depending on the bank processing time.

Why the ATO take longer than 21 days to process?

Some Tax Returns might take longer than the usual 14-21 business days for the ATO to process. The reasons could be as follows:

• Paper tax return: It could take up to 30 days for them to manually process your tax return and issue the refund.
• Amended tax return: As it is an amendment, they may take longer than usual.
• Overdue tax return: During the tax season, ATO will focus on the current year tax returns first, rather than overdue tax returns from previous years.
• Existing Debt: If you have existing debts with the ATO, Centrelink or any other government agency, the ATO might take a longer time to look at these debts, potentially using your refund to pay off some of these debts.

**Please note that the ATO will not accept any enquiry about the tax return until 30 days after lodgement.

For more information please contact us or email at [email protected]