The Australian Tax Office will use new tools to chase down multinational countries funnels their profits out of Australia to avoid hefty tax bills.

The ATO has launched a four-year investigation covering 86 major companies, looking for evidence of companies are using global subsidiaries, profit shifting or other techniques to avoid paying bill in the higher tax zone of Australia.

The Tax Office will not say who it is looking at just yet, but there is strong speculation that tech-giants Apple and Google will be on the list, given accusations that they benefit hugely from shuffling their profits out of Australia.

Recent reports said Apple has paid a meagre $193 million, or 0.7 per cent of its $26.7 billion turnover, to the Australian Tax Office over eleven years to 2013.

The new investigations come in the wake of the G20 finance ministers’ summit in recent weeks, wherein the OECD promised to take action against miserly multinationals.

Investigators says there is a fine legal line that the companies must tread,

“These [are] 86 cases where we felt that the structuring events that had taken place seem to have a very bad effect on a company's Australian tax position or Australian profitability,” ATO deputy commissioner Mark Konza has told the ABC.

“We will issue assessments on companies that we think weren't applying the law correctly.

“If they're involved in profit shifting, they'll get an assessment; they'll get penalties as well.

“Transfer pricing is the price you pay for goods or services you receive; profit shifting is when you inflate those transfer prices above their economic value for the purpose of moving profit out of Australia and avoiding tax,” he said.

“We have new transfer pricing legislation only 18 months old, I think that has given us extensive power regarding the correct pricing of transactions, which is what we're mainly examining,” Mr Konza added.

“So, we'll be looking to see how that law works when we take it into these cases.”

Tax law expert Antony Ting from the University of Sydney Business School says the investigation will keep companies on their toes, but he believes they will have covered their backs.

“It depends on which kind of companies they're looking at. If they're looking at these huge multinationals, I'm sure most of them will have very good tax advice,” he said.

“But the current exercise may be fruitful to pick up those less careful multinationals with more aggressive tax structures that are not in with full compliance with the law, then the ATO should be able to get some results.”