Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I'm really pleased to stand and speak on this report. It is an important one. As the chair has said, there are a number of recommendations in this report that ask the tax office to go further in a range of areas. But, before I go to that, I just want to add my voice to something the chair said, and acknowledge the work that the ATO staff have done over the last little while, not just during the COVID pandemic but before that. They are an institution in this country that has done remarkable work over many, many years. The last decade has seen extraordinary challenges as the world has changed and extraordinary opportunities as technology has made it possible for them to rethink entirely the way they interact with the general population. These are extraordinary times for any organisation. During these extraordinary times we've seen them also take on the Australian Business Register, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission and the super clearing house. They have undertaken a digitising and streamlining process. They've introduced online tax professional platforms, Single Touch Payroll, activity statement financial processing, greater tax compliance and less tax avoidance, a training program for small business.

Then of course came the COVID pandemic, and they were doing early release of superannuation, JobKeeper—extraordinary additions to what was their workload a decade ago, and, in many areas, the world was changing so fast and the opportunities and the possibilities were changing so fast that it wasn't really possible for anyone to be in front of that, particularly people that work in an institution that has to be as precise as the ATO. They did a really clever thing early on with their practitioner lodgement service, which allows software vendors and digital providers to sit on the back end and allows taxpayers great flexibility in the process that they use to engage with the tax office. That's a possibility that needs expansion, by the way, because, as the world changes and, around the world, the technology becomes more interesting and opens up more opportunities, we in this country want to be leaders. We want our software and software vendors to be leaders in finding those solutions for the full range of taxpayers, being there on the front line and exporting to the world. And congratulations to the ATO for what they've done there.

There is one paragraph in this report that I want to come to next, and this is a statement made by the Inspector-General of Taxation. It is referenced on page 13:

The IGTO noted in its submission to the Committee that while the ATO has had its functions extended over time, its workforce has experienced the opposite fate. The agency's 2018-19 annual report noted a reduction in the number of employees, both ongoing and non-ongoing, of approximately six per cent over the reporting period.

So, while we had this extraordinary increase in opportunities and challenges, we had a reduction in the resources that the ATO had to apply to this extraordinary time that they find themselves in. The chair is also right that this chamber is responsible for the vision that the ATO follows. This chamber—government specifically, but all of us in this chamber—forms part of the process that guides the ATO and ensures the ATO has the resources it needs to be a world-class leader in change management for the change that is taking place right now in our tax systems right across the world.

You have to remember that we have a tax system essentially that began in the agrarian age. A monk developed the accounting year, which was perfectly fine before you had industrial equipment and depreciation, perfectly fine when you had an annual thing. Christmas decorations would work under the same process. Then suddenly we had capital equipment, so we had depreciation. Then suddenly the business cycle wasn't a year, so we had loss carry-back, and we added to it. Then we had multinationals. Things changed. We had business. We had PAYG. Now we have contractors. The world has changed so much. We've added bits and pieces of tax law to make it work, until the tax act is like this. The chair is right: there are processes we could find that would simplify the law for sections, and that process that the ATO introduced that allows software vendors to develop software packages specifically for different sectors of the community is really important in helping to make that happen. But we are at an extraordinary time and I'd say again that, whether we're talking about multinational tax avoidance or compliance generally, there is much greater role for this chamber in providing the vision and the resources the ATO needs to lead. It is an organisation that has some amazing people and they are capable of much more than they are doing. Again, when they read this, they will probably notice that most of our recommendations ask them to do more. And, every time we ask them to do more, we then ask them to verify it with data, which means they have to do more to verify that they did it. They face quite a challenge at the moment. So we need to make sure that, if we ask them to do things, we in this chamber are standing with them and ensuring they have the power and the resources to do it.

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