As many as nine government agencies may be involved with the payroll company at the centre of a $165m tax fraud investigation, Labor senator Doug Cameron has said.
Cameron said on Friday he had been contacted by contractors working for eight federal and state government departments, the ABC and private companies such as Telstra and Fujitsu, who said their pay had been affected by the scandal.
He said contractors working for the departments of immigration, foreign affairs, social services, defence and industry, as well as the NDIS and ABC, had all been affected.
Transport NSW and the NSW Department of Justice have also been hit, as have Telstra, Fujitsu Australia, FinXL and Sirius Technologies, he said.
“I’m very concerned that there are contractors who have done the right thing, who’ve carried out their functions for the Commonwealth, and there seems to be problems about getting payments,” he told Guardian Australia.
Plutus Payroll is at the centre of an alleged $165m tax fraud, one of the biggest white-collar investigations in Australian history. Ten people were arrested on Thursday following dramatic raids across Sydney.
Two of those arrested were 30-year-old Adam Cranston and his 24-year-old sister, Lauren, the son and daughter of Australian Taxation Office deputy commissioner Michael Cranston.
Michael Cranston also faces two charges of abusing his position as a public official by allegedly seeking information about the ATO’s investigation into his children. The AFP believes he did not have any knowledge of the conspiracy involving his son and daughter.
Plutus provided payroll services to government agencies and private companies, paying the net wages of contractors and sending the tax to the ATO.
It is alleged Adam Cranston and others paid the after-tax wages to the contractors but withheld millions of dollars in tax from the ATO. They allegedly did so by funnelling the funds through a number of second-tier companies which paid only paid a fraction of the tax, with the rest distributed to Adam Cranston and his syndicate.
The alleged theft dates back to June 2016.
On Friday, Labor said it hoped the investigation would not jeopardise the ATO’s other investigations, including into the Panama Papers.
Cameron said he became suspicious about Plutus two weeks ago when hundreds of IT contractors were left without pay after Plutus abruptly stopped trading.
It prompted him to ask the Parliamentary Library to run company searches on Plutus, which uncovered a web of interrelated companies.
He alerted officials at the ATO, made a formal complaint to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and posted his concerns on his Facebook page.
He was then inundated with emails from contractors who said their pay had been affected, he said.
Cameron is now calling for an inquiry into how Plutus came to be providing payroll services for state and federal government contractors.
“How deep and wide is this problem within government departments? How many government departments are involved? How many government contractors have been left out of pocket? And how do they propose to pay the contractors?” Cameron said.
“In the medium term, how can the government introduce due process to ensure this never happens again? And how can ordinary Australians doing contract work for the federal government be assured that they’re going to get paid for the work they’re doing?
“You would think that contracting for the Commonwealth government would be one of the safest things you could do.”
The ATO declined to confirm the number of government agencies affected by the alleged fraud.
A spokesman said the ATO had nothing to add to a statement on its website.
