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ATO agrees to improve help for accounting professionals

Tom McIlroy
Tom McIlroyPolitical correspondent

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The Tax Office has agreed to consult accountants and business activity statement agents on how to improve an industry help line, after an Auditor-General’s report found room for better assistance to the industry.

The review found the ATO provides largely effective services and support for tax practitioners around Australia. However, less evident to auditors was how it monitored the effectiveness of answers to requests for help, including whether enquiries were satisfactorily resolved.

Mark Molesworth, tax partner at BDO, has welcomed steps to boost performance. 

The report said the ATO was largely effective in implementing its tax practitioner engagement activities, while a strategic plan was partly effective. Improvements to the tax agent phone line were recommended, including consultation with tax agents to guide its future development.

About 64,000 tax and business activity statement agents registered with the Tax Practitioners Board are covered by the report. The group has oversight of 70 per cent of tax returns and 57 per cent of business activity statements.

As a group, they made 1.5 million phone calls to the ATO in 2020-21.

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BDO tax partner Mark Molesworth welcomed plans to improve the knowledge of staff manning the tax agents phone line.

“This is a common refrain among practitioners – the person on the phone from the ATO often can’t help and must ‘escalate’ the enquiry – leading to wasted time and double handling,” he said.

“We suspect that many practitioners will still be concerned about the one-to-one interactions that they have with the ATO other than over the phone line.

“Commonly we hear of information being provided to the ATO appearing to drop into a black hole of ‘escalation’ and ‘referral to experts’ for six months or more, and then practitioners being pressured to answer queries in two- or four-week time frames.

“This is likely symptomatic of the same concerns associated with the phone line – insufficiently experienced frontline staff and insufficient capacity in the high-expertise areas at the ATO.”

Mr Molesworth said it was concerning that less than half of participants in ATO consultations were somewhat or very confident in the approach of the ATO.

The report recommended better communication to tax professionals and a new measurement of the effectiveness of outreach by the ATO. It also said moves to measure transparency, consistency and diversity in consultation was needed.

Second Commissioner of Taxation Jeremy Hirschhorn said the ATO agreed with the report’s recommendations and would “continue to refine and improve” the ways the organisation engaged with tax agents.

Tom McIlroy is the Financial Review's political correspondent, reporting from the federal press gallery at Parliament House. Connect with Tom on Twitter. Email Tom at thomas.mcilroy@afr.com

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