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Usually, in the lead-up to elections, governments make all sort of promises in the hope that this will give them favour with the electorate. But we’re delighted to report that with small business tax reform the Morrison government is delivering, not simply talking.

Today the government announced that the Small Business Tax Tribunal will start up on the 1 March 2019—just two weeks away. This is huge. We continue to see bad ATO small business audits and an ATO incapable of quickly fixing glaring audit errors. It’s an audit system of considerable incompetence, with small business people the victims.  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...

Bill Shorten’s Labor has announced that it will make unfair contract terms illegal and impose major fines for breaches. This is a position that we totally endorse.

Unfair contract laws protecting small business people were created in November 2015. Big businesses had 12 months to fix their contracts before the laws took effect. But big businesses did nothing. The ACCC has worked hard to enforce the laws but the task is huge when large businesses won’t voluntarily comply. (Idiots! Big business, that is!)  More...

This week ex-Deputy ATO Commissioner Michael Cranston arrived at court for the start of his trial for allegedly using his office with the intention of dishonestly obtaining a benefit for his son.  Cranston was the top tax official in charge of high-wealth individuals. His trial forms a backdrop to questions about the integrity of the Australian Taxation Office.

We’ve raised questions as to whether the ATO suffers from internal corruption. In September last year we released a major report on a special deal handed to high-wealth individuals in 2013. The deal was organised by then-Deputy Commissioner Michael Cranston, with a loss of tax revenue estimated as high as $4.3 billion. There are calls for a high level inquiry. 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...

The construction sector has high numbers of self-employed, independent contractors, but it’s an area that has always attracted significant controversy.

While the industry is in holiday shutdown we thought subbies (in between watching cricket, fishin’ and so on) might have a minute or two to catch up on new enforcement processes important to their businesses.  More...

In what would seem a rather startling revelation in The Australian yesterday, Robert Gottliebsen comments that, pending an explanation, in his view

“…as it now stands, there is one law for the alleged criminals and another for law-abiding, taxpaying people.”

“One explanation is that the ATO is completely above the law and not subject to any laws that elected politicians may choose to pass.”

Last Wednesday we had a thank you dinner for Norman Lacy, our Chair of 10 years and board member since our formation 18 years ago.

Norman has finally decided to step aside from Self-Employed Australia. We had a wonderful dinner which included a presentation and discussion from Robert Gottliebsen, business columnist for The Australian on current business, economic and political events.  More...

Late last night the news broke of the Morrison government’s decision to create a Small Business Tax Tribunal. Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian has scooped the story.

We launched a campaign in February last year for a Small Business Tax Tribunal. Obviously, we are hugely pleased to see the Morrison government take this initiative for fair treatment of small businesses.  More...