Senator John Williams, who questioned Mr Jordan about the ATO's settlement with Hogan, has responded by calling for Hogan to table the settlement amount before Parliament so "we'll know exactly what happened", he told Fairfax Media.

Appearing before Senate estimates on Tuesday morning, Mr Jordan suggested that Hogan had paid tens of millions of dollars to settle a long-running legal battle with the ATO.

Hogan hit back, calling Mr Jordan and Senator Williams "two absolute boofheads, talking to each other about stuff they don't know".

Hogan's solicitor Andrew Robinson told Fairfax Media on Wednesday that the Tax Commissioner had either been "poorly briefed" or had suffered from "a lack of recollection".

Mr Robinson claimed that comments made by Mr Jordan implied that his client had settled with the ATO in order not to be criminally prosecuted.

He pointed out that the Australian Crime Commission had dropped the criminal investigation into Hogan's tax affairs two years before Hogan reached his settlement with the ATO.

However, when asked whether the settlement figure with the ATO was tens of millions of dollars, Mr Robinson said, "It was a very complicated and involved settlement with numerous deeds between numerous parties.

"You would need to put it on a whiteboard to explain how the settlement occurred," he said.

On Tuesday, Mr Jordan had expressed his irritation that Hogan and Mr Robinson had been falsely claiming that Hogan had come out on top in his battle with the ATO.

The Crocodile Dundee star and his then collaborator John Cornell were the most high-profile targets of Project Wickenby, a joint ATO and ACC probe into money laundering and tax evasion using overseas accounts

The ATO initially pursued the duo for unpaid tax in excess of $150 million, claiming they had evaded tax by channelling the massive profits from the Crocodile Dundee franchise through a series of overseas tax havens.

In 2012, after five years of battling through the courts, Hogan and Cornell reached a confidential settlement with the ATO.

In Tuesday's estimates hearing, Mr Jordan said, "Because someone doesn't go to court and get formally charged doesn't mean - I am talking in a general sense - they haven't paid a substantial amount of tax to settle the matter."

Mr Jordan went on to suggest that "amounts in the tens of millions" were paid to settle some matters.

He said "it takes a lot to prove criminal intent" and that, from the ATO's point of view, it was often more cost-effective to accept a payment.

Senator Williams quipped, "I read that as the people we are talking about [Hogan and Cornell] paid tens of millions of dollars to the ATO to settle the issue. I can take that with confidence can I?"

The commissioner replied, "I can't talk about specific issues but, yes, if we get what we think is the tax due to us with penalties and interest, then yes we'll settle it."

Several hours later, Hogan launched a scathing attack on Senator Williams and Mr Jordan.

"The two boofheads, the two absolute boofheads, talking to each other about stuff they don't know, subtly suggesting that I've paid my way out of the criminal situation," Hogan told Ross Greenwood on radio 2GB.

"I mean they couldn't have made it any more subtle, could they?

"The boofhead from the tax department said, 'You know, we could go after people' - inferring me I guess - 'criminally, but that could take four or five years, so if we've got the money, we rightly let it go.'

"Excuse me? They looked up my quoit for five years. They involved the IRS, the Australian Tax Office, the Chancellor of the Exchequer or whatever they call it in England, and they found nothing. They found that I had done nothing. So I didn't pay them off, and I certainly didn't pay them tens of millions so they would just let me go without sending me to jail.

"I would have been quite happy to go to court, to show the incompetence of the whole investigation, which has smeared me around the world. And now they've brought it up again, so I should have sued them in the first place."

Mr Robinson said the ACC had written to him in November 2010, saying: "The ACC has come to the view that continuing with this criminal investigation of Mr Hogan is no longer justified on the material presently available to the ACC."

The letter also said that the ACC had concluded "that there are insufficient prospects of securing convictions to justify continuing with its criminal investigation at this time."

Senator Williams said he would call for Hogan's deed of settlement to be tabled before the Senate so that "the whole truth will come out".

Mr Robinson said that, with so much "misinformation" about the settlement, he would be happy to table the settlement deed as long as all parties agreed.

With Georgina Mitchell