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Last Thursday (14 March), the current Australian Taxation Commissioner delivered a major speech.

He said of himself: More...

According to demographer Bernard Salt, there’s a big cultural shift in Australia towards being your own boss. And it’s a lifestyle thing. In The Australian Bernard referred to: More...

On Friday (22 February) another scathing report on the performance of the ATO was released. (See this media coverage.) This time it was from the Parliamentary Committee responsible for overseeing the ATO. The report was particularly critical of the ATO’s treatment of small business people. The Committee made 37 major recommendations for ATO change. (Details are here.)

We’re delighted to see this new report and thank goodness parliamentarians are listening and probing. But we need action now.  More...

Last week top ex-ATO official Michael Cranston was found not guilty of misusing his position to benefit his son who is on separate charges of alleged tax fraud.

In his defence Mr Cranston said that the actions he took in relation to his son were no more than what he had done for other taxpayers on hundreds of occasions. That is, that tax audits were often so bad that he had to intervene to stop injustice against taxpayers.  More...

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...