Am I going to get audited?

The fear that outlasts the refund

Almost everyone who does their own tax carries a version of it. Not guilt, exactly. You didn't invent deductions. You just weren't sure, twice, and you rounded up once, and now the word "audit" has a permanent corner of your brain.

Here's what the fear gets wrong: the ATO isn't peering through your window. It's reading your data. Banks, employers, health funds and government agencies send your numbers in before you've opened myTax (that's what pre-fill is). So the fastest way to draw attention isn't a big claim. It's telling them something different from what they already know.

So you check before you lodge

You say: here's my draft return, is anything in it risky? The audit risk check runs your numbers against around 13 red flags drawn from published ATO guidance: income that doesn't match what's been reported about you, deductions out of proportion to your occupation and income, claims in the areas the ATO has said it watches.

What comes back isn't a verdict. It's a band (low, medium, high) with every flag explained and cited, so you can see exactly which line earned it and what the ATO actually says about it. Most of the time the answer is: you're fine, and now you know why you're fine.

The reasons matter more than the band. A flag doesn't mean don't claim it. It means this is the claim to have records for.

Priya's ten minutes

Priya photographs weddings, sole trader, second year in. Draft return done, one nagging doubt: her working-from-home claim feels big. She asks.

Two flags come back. Her interest income is missing $34 that her bank has already reported (a forgotten savings account, easily fixed). And her equipment claims are large for her income, which is normal for a photographer in a gear-heavy year, and exactly the kind of claim to have the receipts for. The band lands on low. She fixes the $34, checks the receipts folder, lodges, and gets her September back.

Priya is made up. Pre-fill, the bands and the guidance behind each flag are real.

What a flag is, and isn't

None of this predicts an audit, and be suspicious of anything that claims to. The check reads your draft against what the ATO has published, nothing more. It can't see what the ATO's own systems see, and it isn't tax advice. What it does is convert a vague background dread into a short, specific list: this line, this reason, this source. Dread doesn't have a to-do list. This does.

And if something material surfaces, that's the moment for a registered tax agent, with the citations already in hand.