Public country-by-country reporting: preliminary eligibility issues and ATO draft instructions

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has released draft instructions for consultation, for completing the public country-by-country reporting (PCbCR) annual report form (Public CBC report).

This follows the recent ATO release of the XML approved schema for report submissions with accompanying business implementation guide instructions.

The PCbCR rules are very wide in scope (impacting both large Australian groups and large foreign groups with Australian operations). The first Public CBC reports to the ATO are due by 30 June 2026, for the ATO to subsequently publish on data.gov.au. Completion of reports may require extensive preparatory work to be able to identify the necessary information. The global parent entity (the public CBC reporting parent) has the requirement to submit, regardless of whether it is an Australian or overseas entity.

Groups must consider the application of the regime, including assessing threshold questions to determine if they are subject to the disclosures. If yes, you should then consider: 

• Whether you should make an exemption request to the ATO for the 2025 year – consider the ATO’s draft instructions to their staff for considering requests, in draft Law Administration Practice Statement PS LA 2025/D1.
• Completing the ATO registration form for public CBC reporting parents who will be required to provide Public CBC reports.
• The reporting regime will require large multinational enterprises with Australian-sourced income of AU$10m or more to publish specified information on a country-by-country basis; whether the $10 million threshold is met is determined by aggregated turnover test.
• Whether your systems and processes are in place to provide the ATO with the necessary information by the due date, including to assess gaps in information for example for the approach to tax, description of activities, related party revenue from outside the jurisdiction and explanation of difference between tax accrued and profit before tax times standard tax rate.

We set out below a number of interpretative issues that are arising when determining if the PCbCR rules apply, which may require detailed consideration and further action.

The draft ATO instructions:

• Provide step-by-step practical guidance for preparers, with a general overview and six more detailed sections.
• Clarify how to complete each section and field in the report form, including where exemptions have been obtained.
• Address some common scenarios in determining disclosures.

There is overlap of information with the ATO’s business implementation guide and the two documents should be used together: the business implementation guide for technical XML schema compliance, and the instructions to assist practical completion.

The draft instructions are open for comment until 28 November 2025 and EY is engaging with the ATO on the content and suggestions for clarifications and improvements.

While the instructions include many valuable comments on the application of the law, they are not an ATO guidance product and so do not include detailed ATO views on technical elements of the rules. We summarize the report instructions below.

Further information on the PCbCR rules and the ATO’s draft PS LA for exemption requests is in our previous EY Tax Alert - EY Tax Alert: Public country-by-country reporting: ATO draft guidance for exemption applications and registration form.

We are still waiting for the final version of the ATO’s draft PS LA 2025/D1 (issued July 2025) regarding exemption requests.