Modern slavery reporting sounds like compliance for miners and supermarkets. Most founders file it under “problems we’d love to have” and move on. But the trigger in the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) is $100 million in annual consolidated revenue — and consolidated is doing more work in that sentence than most founders realise. Group revenue, not entity revenue. Gross revenue, not profit. Measured under accounting standards that can sweep in your subsidiaries, your gross marketplace flows, or your overseas parent. Scale-ups cross it earlier than they expect, and the obligations reach well below the threshold through enterprise procurement long before the Act formally applies.
Who Has to Report
The Act requires a reporting entity to give the Minister a modern slavery statement each year. You are a reporting entity for a reporting period if you are an Australian entity — or a foreign entity carrying on business in Australia — with consolidated revenue of at least $100 million for that period. “Modern slavery” is defined broadly: trafficking, slavery, servitude, forced marriage, forced labour, debt bondage, deceptive recruiting for labour or services and the worst forms of child labour, in your operations and your supply chains.
The reporting period is your financial year, and the statement is due within six months of year end — 31 December, for a standard 30 June balancer. It must be approved by your principal governing body (the board) and signed by a responsible member (a director), and it is published on the public Modern Slavery Statements Register. Related entities can lodge a single joint statement covering the group, and entities under the threshold can opt in voluntarily.
How $100 Million “Consolidated Revenue” Actually Works
This is where growing companies get caught. Four features of the test matter:
- It’s group revenue. Consolidated revenue is the revenue of the entity plus every entity it controls, worked out under the Australian Accounting Standards — even if those standards don’t otherwise apply to you. Control is tested under AASB 10, so wholly-owned operating subsidiaries, foreign subs and controlled special-purpose entities all count towards the parent’s number.
- It’s revenue, not profit. A capital-intensive or thin-margin business — logistics, fintech lending, hardware, wholesale — can be a reporting entity while still burning cash.
- The characterisation of your revenue matters. For marketplaces and payments businesses, whether you recognise gross transaction value or only your net take depends on the principal-versus-agent analysis under AASB 15. A business clipping 5% of $500 million in flows reports $25 million in revenue as agent — but a principal characterisation of the same flows would put you far over the threshold. If your model sits anywhere near that line, the accounting judgement is also a Modern Slavery Act judgement.
- Foreign parents count their global revenue. After a Delaware flip, the US topco is a foreign entity — and if it carries on business in Australia, its consolidated revenue includes the whole group’s global earnings. A group whose Australian opco turns over $15 million can still be captured at the top. Which group entity reports, and whether a joint statement is the answer, is a structuring question worth asking before the first statement is due, not after.
The test applies period by period, to the year just ended. A company that grows from $60 million to $110 million during a financial year doesn’t get a grace year: it is a reporting entity for that period, and the statement — covering risk mapping, actions taken and their effectiveness across the same period — is due six months later. If the first time you think about modern slavery is when the threshold test comes back positive, you will be writing a statement about a year in which you did nothing.
What the Statement Must Say
The Act prescribes seven mandatory criteria. A compliant statement must identify the reporting entity; describe its structure, operations and supply chains; describe the risks of modern slavery practices in the operations and supply chains of the entity and any entities it owns or controls; describe the actions taken to assess and address those risks, including due diligence and remediation processes; explain how the entity assesses the effectiveness of those actions; describe consultation with owned or controlled entities; and include any other relevant information.
For a software or hardware scale-up, the real risk exposure usually sits in predictable places: contract manufacturing and electronics components, offshore development and BPO arrangements, data-labelling workforces, cleaning, security and facilities contracts, and branded merchandise. “We’re a tech company, we have no supply chain” is not a defensible statement — it’s the kind the regulator has repeatedly called out as boilerplate.
What Happens If You Don’t Report
Today, the Act contains no financial penalties. Under section 16A, the Minister can request an explanation from a non-compliant entity and request remedial action, and if the entity still fails to comply, can publicly name it — including on the Register. Name-and-shame is the current enforcement model, and for a startup selling to enterprise and government buyers who screen suppliers, a public non-compliance listing is a genuine commercial injury.
But the settings are changing. The statutory review of the Act (the McMillan review, tabled May 2023) recommended civil penalties, a mandatory due diligence obligation and lowering the threshold to $50 million. The Government’s December 2024 response supported most recommendations, agreed to consult on civil penalties for failing to report, providing false information and ignoring remedial requests, and left the threshold at $100 million for now — expressly deferring it to the next review. A federal Anti-Slavery Commissioner has been in office since December 2024, and consultation through 2025 and 2026 has focused on a mandatory, risk-based due diligence obligation and powers to declare high-risk products and services. In July 2026 the Government went further, announcing plans for civil penalties for non-compliant reporting and a proposed criminal offence of failing to prevent modern slavery for entities over the $100 million threshold, subject to a reasonable-steps defence — still to be consulted on and legislated. The direction of travel is unmistakable: from disclosure-only to due diligence with teeth. (One thing you can ignore: the NSW modern slavery legislation does not impose a separate reporting obligation on private companies — the Commonwealth regime is the one that matters here.)
Below the Threshold, You’re Already In the System
Here is the practical reality for sub-$100 million startups: reporting entities must describe the risks in their supply chains — and you are their supply chain. Enterprise and government customers discharge that obligation by pushing it downstream: modern slavery questionnaires in procurement onboarding, supplier codes of conduct, contractual warranties about your labour practices and your own suppliers, audit rights, and termination triggers. If you sell to banks, telcos, universities or government, you are probably already contractually bound to parts of this regime years before the Act applies to you directly. Answering those questionnaires well — and having a short modern slavery policy and basic supplier due diligence to point to — is increasingly a sales asset, not just compliance. Some scale-ups go further and lodge a voluntary statement precisely because their buyers read the Register.
The Bottom Line
The $100 million trigger tests group-wide, gross, accounting-standards revenue for the year just ended — so model when you’ll cross it, get the consolidation and principal-versus-agent analysis right, and start building supplier due diligence at least a year before the threshold arrives, because your first statement reports on the year you crossed it. And if enterprise customers are already sending you modern slavery questionnaires, treat that as the regime’s early-warning system: penalties are coming, the threshold may yet fall, and the companies that treat this as supply-chain hygiene rather than paperwork will be the ones for whom the statement writes itself.
This article is general information only, not legal advice — whether your group is a reporting entity turns on your structure, your accounting treatment and your reporting period, and you should take advice on your specific position. Viridian Lawyers advises Australian founders and scale-ups on compliance, procurement contracting and investment readiness. If the threshold is on your horizon — or your customers’ questionnaires have already arrived — get in touch.
