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We rushed into action late Saturday night when we discovered that a really scary tax Bill was listed for a vote in Parliament this week.

The new law is supposed to stop illegal phoenixing. (That’s when someone sends their business bankrupt then ‘rebirths’ it under another name. They leave victims with huge debts.) But this new law would instead empower the ATO to: More...

There seems to be a new way to spell ‘incompetent.’ It’s now spelt ‘HM Revenue and Customs.’ That’s the title of the UK tax authority.

The new spelling of ‘incompetent’ is justified given the way HMRC have grossly botched up the handling of self-employed tax in the UK since 2000. We’ve put together the story which we find quite gobsmacking. More...

Yes, we have focused heavily on seeking reform of the Australian Taxation Office in recent times. But the issue is not simply about tax revenue. It’s much bigger. It’s about the rule of law. In this longer-than-normal communication we explain what motivates us by drawing some parallels between China and the ATO.  More...

Goodness. We had lots of people respond to our last news alert of (boring) summer tax reading. Large numbers of people downloaded our December submissions to Parliamentary and Treasury reviews of the Australian Taxation Office.

So we thought we’d enliven your summer reading even more! This time it’s the submission we made to Treasury in its review of Australian Business Numbers.

Over the last few years the ATO has been aggressively denying individuals access to ABNs and cancelling ABNs. There’s been an attitude that many people are not really running small businesses. The ATO reckons that it can identify a ‘real’ business from a ‘sham’ business.  More...

We trust the Xmas pudding and New Year champers have worked through your system and you now feel suitably relaxed as the new business year slowly winds back up.

If you’re after some ‘exciting’ tax reading (yawn!), we had bit of a flurry of submissions we needed to get to the government and parliament before Christmas. Here are a couple of them. More...

If you’re not happy with your treatment by the ATO, you have a chance to put your story on the record. But you need to be quick. We’ve just become aware that the Parliamentary Committee that most closely reviews the ATO is calling for last-minute stories from people about their treatment by the ATO. Self-Employed Australia will be putting in a submission. More...

It’s a shock to find that what could be viewed as arguably the greatest tax scandal in Australia’s history was organised by the Australian Taxation Office. The tax revenue loss from high-wealth individuals who should have paid tax is likely in the order of $2 billion, perhaps even more.

The tax losses relate to an ATO tax amnesty called Project Do It which gave massive tax advantages to Australian high-wealth individuals who had hidden $6.5 billion in secret overseas (mostly Swiss) bank accounts. They were tax evaders who were about to be caught.  More...

Here’s an amazing admission. The United Kingdom tax authority, HMRC, has admitted that it does secret deals to avoid damaging the reputation of the most powerful members of society, allowing them to escape prosecution for financial crimes. But it still prosecutes small business people!

Gob-smacked? Yep! Talk about one rule for the rich and another for the ordinary person. We thought the UK is a democracy and isn’t there this historical thing called Magna Carta??? More...