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Yes, I know. We don’t have much of a reputation for giving praise to the Australian Taxation Office. In fact we’re probably pretty mean. Here’s us calling the ATO lifeless, frozen dinosaurs and that they must think that the world is flat.

Given our comments, we’ve had people ask us how in the world we managed to have the cancelled ABNs reinstated.

Well, first we had great legal leadership. Here’s John and Paige Findley (our primary legal team) with Annette Pike (she’s on the left) from OutScribe shortly after the agreement to reinstate the ABNs was formalized.

Then, the support of key journalists was critical:

• Robert Gottliebsen wrote Vulnerable small business operators denied tax justice and The tax office should collect tax, not attempt to engineer business.
• and Grace Collier said Opportunity to make money matters more than holding down a job.

There were also key people in the ATO with whom we had pretty full-on discussions, but we can’t directly identify them. We’ve got to thank those people. The ATO is a complex machine with lots of moving parts, many of which don’t seem to communicate all that well with each other. The ATO people we dealt with on this issue put in a huge effort and were pivotal in the ABN reinstatement outcome. Our thanks to them.

Further, there is the team at OutScribe, the Pike family. They are super-well organized and run a great small business. We worked very tightly with them. They’ve said this about the reinstatement campaign:

We feel very fortunate that we came across SEA. Ken and John have worked tirelessly on behalf of OutScribe and the contractors, with the result that the contractors' ABNs have been reinstated. OutScribe's case is still open to investigation with the ATO but we've got the SEA in our corner.

I suppose the big lesson in all this is that the ATO has a habit of behaving aggressively towards self-employed people and we need to stick together. That’s why we’ve put in place the Protected Member insurance with the Lloyd’s of London syndicate Brit. Join here.

Remember: you need to be a member before you have a problem. Join here.

We’ll have more information about this story soon.