Old Bank Statements

 Author: farahwilliam45(Initiate)Initiate

26 Mar 2026

Hi there,

Yeah, this can be a bit frustrating once you’re past that 7-year window.

What CBA told you is partly true, but a bit misleading. The ATO doesn’t actually store your bank statements the way a bank does. They may have some financial information (like income, interest earned, or reported data), but not full detailed bank statements with every transaction.

That said, here are a few things you can try:

• Contact the ATO directly and ask what records they hold for that year. You can do this via your myGov account or by calling them. Sometimes you can access historical data like income statements or summaries.
• Check your myGov → ATO → Tax returns section. If you lodged a return that year, there may be some linked financial info.
• If the statement is really important, try going back to CBA and escalating the request in some cases, banks can retrieve older archived records, but it’s not guaranteed and may come with a fee.
• Also worth checking if you might have old emails, PDFs, or backups (cloud storage, old devices, etc.), just in case you saved copies back then.

Unfortunately, once it’s beyond their retention policy, it can be hit or miss. But I’d start with the ATO via myGovit’s probably your best next step.

Hope that helps a bit, and good luck finding it!

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