The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) now has access to Swiss banking records, enabling officials to make sure that Aussies with such accounts pay their fair share of tax.

"If we go to the almost cliched Swiss bank account, we just received our first list of all Australians who hold Swiss bank accounts," Deputy tax commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn said in an interview with the ABC's AM program.  "Of course, there's nothing wrong with holding a Swiss bank account. But certainly there's a few people in the list that we're pretty interested about."

Officials have a list of wealthy people they want to monitor, but for now is not confirming if prominent Aussies are on it.

"I don't want to go into people on the list in terms of individuals.  But what I would say is that prominent Australians are generally good taxpayers," Hirschhorn said.  "You would be surprised if there were household names on the list."

There's nothing actually wrong with having a Swiss bank account, unless it is used to hide income and assets.  Earlier this week, the ATO's corporate tax transparency report showed around a third of large Australian companies failed to pay tax as they continue to claim tax losses and concessions that go back several years.