ATO commissioner Chris Jordan reveals PwC breach shared with AFP in 2018

In his opening statement to a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday evening, Australian Taxation Office commissioner Chris Jordan said the matter had been discussed with the Australian Federal Police in 2018.

An Australian Federal Police spokesperson said the tax office had asked for advice and it deemed there was "insufficient information" to proceed with a formal referral.

Last week, the Treasury Department confirmed it had referred the incident engulfing the embattled consulting firm to the AFP for criminal investigation.

"As the confidentiality breach was not a tax offence, we were unable to investigate the matter further and from 2018, we sought to refer this matter to the correct authority," Mr Jordan said.

"After sharing information with the Australian Federal Police over the 2018 - 2019 period, we ultimately formally referred the matter to the Tax Practitioners Board in July 2020."

Tax officials fronting senators said it was considered there was "insufficient information" to proceed with the criminal investigation.

"I am told that emails are circumstantial information, and because we don't have that criminal investigative powers, we had no power to request," Mr Jordan said.

Restrictive secrecy laws prevented the tax office from sharing key details with other departments and the then-ministers' offices, the commissioner said.

"I would say to the restrictive nature of our secretive provisions that it is an offence under our laws for us to provide information that we're not allowed to do so by law," Mr Jordan said.

"It's a necessary thing in 99 per cent of cases, right? It's very necessary, but clearly, I think this is an example where maybe we should have been able to disclose that - at least to Treasury."

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The Tax Practitioners Board launched its investigation into the consulting firm in 2021, and terminated the registration of PwC's former international tax head Peter Collins in November 2022 for sharing privileged ATO information with other staff.

Greens senator Barbara Pocock asked Mr Jordan whether the small board was the "fallback", to which he nodded his head.

"There was nowhere else to go," Mr Jordan said.

"We are not allowed to refer to their professional associations. It was literally the AFP, CDPP [Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions] which we'd only take on advice also from AFP, and the TPB."

Greens senator David Shoebridge said it was not clear why the matter was left to a smaller agency to do "the heavy lifting".

"The AFP have known about PWC's behaviour for over five years and for some reason failed to use their compulsory powers to investigate it," he said.

"It appears they just left it up to the tiny, and under-resourced, Tax Practitioners Board to do the heavy lifting. There are so many layers to this scandal."

An AFP spokesperson told The Canberra Times it had only received a "set of representative sample documents" from the tax office.

"In 2018, the Australian Taxation Office requested advice from the AFP in relation to the potential misuse of government information by PricewaterhouseCoopers," the spokesperson said.

"The ATO sought advice on whether there was sufficient information to make a formal referral of the matter to the AFP for investigation.

"The AFP assessed, based on the material that the ATO provided, was that there was insufficient information in the material, to support a formal referral.

"In consultation and agreement with the ATO, the matter was closed in 2019."