Australian tax law dataset — ATO Interpretative Decisions, public rulings, determinations, practical compliance guidelines, and taxpayer alerts, plus the full text and amendment history of the ATO-administered Acts (ITAA 1997, ITAA 1936, GST Act, TAA 1953 and more) sourced from the Federal Register of Legislation — structured for legal RAG, LLM fine-tuning, and tax research automation. 60,000+ ATO documents as RAG-ready NDJSON/CSV.

Machine-readable extracts of Australian Tax Office (ATO) legal documents, scraped from the ATO Legal Database. Each row is one ruling, decision, or guideline — fully parsed into structured columns (CSV) or JSON fields (NDJSON), with all multi-value entries pipe-delimited for downstream NLP, RAG ingestion, and legal AI over Australian tax law (ITAA 1997, ITAA 1936, GST Act).

The dataset also includes a legislation layer built from the Federal Register of Legislation: the principal ATO-administered Acts split into one row per provision, a reconstructed per-section amendment history from Crown-copyright FRL endnotes).

Each dataset is published in two parallel files with identical content and field order:

JSON keys are identical to CSV column names — the schema tables below describe both formats.

• Dataset Splits
• Quick Start
• Schema
  • Edited Private Advice
  • ATO Interpretative Decisions
  • Public Rulings & Determinations
  • Practical Compliance Guidelines
  • Taxpayer Alerts
  • Decision Impact Statements
  • Law Administration Practice Statements
  • Legislative Instruments
  • Advice under Development
  • Principal Legislation
  • Legislation Amendment History
  • Legislation + History Notes
• Use Cases
• Limitations
• Support the Project
• Source & Licensing
• Citation
• Terms of Service

from datasets import load_dataset

# Use a named config — viewer-friendly, strongly typed schema
ds = load_dataset(
    "simplelex/ATO-Australian-Tax-Law-Dataset",
    "edited_private_advice",
    split="train",
)
print(ds[0])

# Available configs: edited_private_advice · ato_interpretative_decisions · public_rulings
#   practical_compliance_guidelines · taxpayer_alerts · decision_impact_statements
#   law_admin_practice_statements · legislative_instruments · advice_under_development
#   frl_principal_legislation · frl_legislation_history · frl_legislation_with_history

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_json("edited_private_advice_all.jsonl", lines=True)
active = df[df["Is_Archived"] == False]
print(active[["Authorisation_Number", "Subject", "Date_of_Advice"]].head())

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("edited_private_advice_all.csv")
active = df[df["Is_Archived"] == False]
print(active[["Authorisation_Number", "Subject", "Date_of_Advice"]].head())

Multi-value fields (legislative references, ruling periods, related documents) use | as the internal delimiter in both formats:

# Explode pipe-delimited legislative references into one row per provision
provisions = (
    active["Relevant_Legislative_Provisions"]
    .str.split(" | ")
    .explode()
    .str.strip()
    .value_counts()
)
print(provisions.head(10))

The column tables below apply to both the CSV and NDJSON variants — every CSV column maps 1:1 to a JSON key of the same name in the corresponding .jsonl file, in the same order.

Private rulings issued to individual taxpayers, anonymised and edited for publication.

Edited summaries of Tax Office internal decisions, released under FOI obligations.

Binding public rulings (TR, TD, IT, CR, PR) and legislative instruments issued by the Commissioner.

Guidelines explaining how the ATO will administer specific areas of tax law, including safe harbours.

The ATO's early-warning notices about tax avoidance schemes currently under review. High practitioner value: warns clients away from flagged arrangements before audit action begins.

The ATO's official response to court and tribunal decisions — whether it accepts the outcome, is appealing, or will update its public guidance. Critical for practitioners: a favourable court ruling means nothing if the ATO is going to the High Court.

Internal ATO instructions to officers on how to apply the law in practice. Not legally binding on taxpayers but widely cited in audit correspondence and objection letters — practitioners use them to predict and contest ATO positions.

Legislative instruments, determinations, and notices made by the Commissioner under tax and related legislation. Registered on the Federal Register of Legislation (FRLI). Includes current instruments, repealed instruments, and drafts for comment.

The ATO's public register of the public advice and guidance it is currently developing — the pipeline behind the other splits. Sourced from the Advice under development program pages rather than the Legal Database. One row per advice product: a single [NNNN] issue often covers several products (draft Determination, final Ruling, Practice Statement) with separate expected completion dates, so Issue_Number is not a primary key — key on Source_URL.

Advice is removed from this split once the document it produces is published to the ATO Legal Database, so it always describes work still in progress.

Current in-force text of every section of the 22 principal Acts the ATO administers — ITAA 1997 & 1936, the GST/LCT/WET Acts, FBTAA, the Taxation Administration Act, the superannuation Acts, the Fuel Tax Act, PRRTAA, the Tax Agent Services Act and more. Sourced from the Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), Crown copyright, reused under CC BY 4.0. One row per provision.

One row per amendment event: which provision changed, the action taken, the amending Act, and when it commenced. Reconstructed from FRL compilation endnotes (Crown copyright, CC BY 4.0)

The flagship FRL dataset. A left-join of #9 and #10 on (Act, Provision_Key) — one row per current section, carrying its full text AND its complete chronological amendment history. This rebuilds the ATO Legal Database's "see history notes" view from freely-licensed FRL data.

• Fine-tuning tax LLMs — 60,000+ structured Australian tax law documents with rich reasoning fields (Reasons_for_Decision, ATO_View_of_Decision) make ready-made supervised fine-tuning examples for legal and tax domain LLMs; ideal training data for ITAA 1997 and GST Act specialists
• Legal RAG pipelines — each row is a self-contained retrieval unit; chunk on Ruling, Reasons_for_Decision, or Compliance_Approach for high-precision retrieval over Australian tax law; compatible with any vector store or RAG framework
• Tax research automation — query and filter across all ATO document types by Document_Type_Code, Is_Withdrawn, and Date_of_Issue to track policy evolution or surface current binding obligations automatically
• Legal NLP — classification, summarisation, and named-entity recognition on Australian tax law; well-suited to legal-NLP, domain-specific NLP research, and text-retrieval benchmarking
• Legislative graph construction — explode Legislative_References to build provision co-citation networks across ITAA 1997, ITAA 1936, GST Act, and more
• Compliance tooling — filter on Document_Type_Code + Is_Withdrawn == False to surface current binding obligations; combine with ATO_View_of_Decision in DIS records to identify contested positions
• Temporal legislation models — train/evaluate models on dated amendment events (Commencement, Amending_Act_Year) for legislative change prediction, version diffing, or "law as at date X" retrieval
• Citation with provenance — pair Source_URL + History_Notes so generated tax answers cite the current provision and its amendment lineage and commencement date

• Currency — the ATO Legal Database is checked for new documents every weekday at 11 am AEST; datasets are updated automatically when new documents are detected. ATO documents may still be updated, withdrawn, or replaced between checks. Always verify against the ATO Legal Database for official or time-sensitive purposes.
• Coverage gaps — Edited Private Advice coverage begins in 2011; earlier private advice is not available on the ATO Legal Database. GST Industry Issues (GII) documents are excluded — they lack standard article structure and do not map cleanly to the schema.
• Parsing fidelity — content is extracted from HTML; some older documents (pre-2010) use non-standard markup that may produce blank or truncated fields. Complex tables, diagrams, and attached PDF appendices are not captured.
• Field sparsity — many optional fields (e.g. Date_of_Withdrawal, Date_Scheme_Commenced) are blank for the majority of records, reflecting source documents that simply do not include those details.
• Boolean encoding — Is_Archived, Is_Withdrawn, Is_Draft, and similar flags are stored as the strings "True" / "False" in both CSV and NDJSON for round-trip parity; cast explicitly if your pipeline expects native booleans.
• Australian jurisdiction only — all documents are issued by the Australian Taxation Office and relate exclusively to Australian tax law (ITAA 1997, ITAA 1936, GST Act, and related legislation). This dataset is not suitable as a general-purpose legal corpus for other jurisdictions.
• Not legal advice — this dataset reproduces publicly available ATO materials for informational and research purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional legal or tax advice.

This dataset is free. If it saves you time on data engineering, a coffee is appreciated:

☕ Buy Me a Coffee

This dataset draws on two official Commonwealth sources, both © Commonwealth of Australia:

• ATO Legal Database (ato.gov.au) — the rulings, advice, determinations, alerts, DIS, PS LA and legislative-instrument datasets. Made available under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
• Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au) — the principal-legislation, amendment-history and history-notes datasets (frl_*). Made available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The history notes are reconstructed in our own wording from the FRL's Crown-copyright compilation endnotes.

Both source licences permit commercial use with attribution. This structured compilation is published by SimpleLex under the same Creative Commons terms.

@dataset{simplelex_ato_rulings_2026,
  author    = {SimpleLex},
  title     = {ATO Tax Legal Rulings — Structured AI Dataset},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/simplelex/ATO-Australian-Tax-Law-Dataset}
}

Last updated: June 2026

The Aussie Tax Legal Database is a structured dataset of publicly available legal documents published by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) at ato.gov.au. Documents include Edited Private Advice, Public Rulings, Determinations, ATO Interpretive Decisions, Practical Compliance Guidelines, Taxpayer Alerts, Decision Impact Statements, and Law Administration Practice Statements. It also includes the principal Acts the ATO administers, with reconstructed amendment-history notes, sourced from the Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au). All datasets are compiled into machine-readable CSV and NDJSON format.

You may use this dataset for any lawful purpose, including research, analysis, building applications, and commercial projects. You do not need to ask permission. Attribution is appreciated but not required for the compilation itself.

The underlying ATO documents are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence. The legislation datasets (frl_*) derive from the Federal Register of Legislation under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence; the amendment-history notes are reconstructed from the FRL's Crown-copyright compilation endnotes. The Commonwealth retains copyright in the original materials. This dataset is a structured compilation and does not claim copyright in the original source material.

Nothing in this dataset constitutes legal or tax advice. Documents are reproductions of publicly available ATO materials provided for informational purposes only. Always consult a registered tax agent or legal professional for advice about your specific situation.

We make no warranties about the completeness, accuracy, or currency of the data. ATO documents may be updated, withdrawn, or replaced after the dataset was last scraped. Always verify against the ATO Legal Database for official or time-sensitive purposes.

To the maximum extent permitted by Australian law, simplelex accepts no liability for any direct, indirect, or consequential loss arising from use of or reliance on this dataset.

We may update these terms at any time. Continued use of the dataset following an update constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.