Kylea Tink (North Sydney, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Small businesses in Australia are under pressure from inflation, rising interest rates, the increasing cost of goods and services and the challenges of hiring and retaining staff. As my electorate is home to the third-largest business centre in Australia, including over 28,000 small businesses, potential new challenges are felt very quickly and keenly by those I represent.

Recently my office has been overrun with concerns expressed about the significant impact of ATO process changes made in November last year, with many small businesses reporting that they simply do not have the resources or administrative expertise to do battle with the bureaucratic behemoth. A local accountant recently explained the challenge to me, saying the new procedure has created a significant new administrative hurdle for small business. In the past, when a business's paperwork got out of hand, owners could leave everything with their accountant to lodge returns through the tax portal. It was pretty straightforward. But the changes introduced in November now mean a business must get a myGovID, link their company or trust to it, which requires hours on the phone, and then log into their business portal, scroll to find their accountant, and send their accountant an invitation, which at the end of the day only allows the accountant to act on their behalf for 12 months, which then means the business has to do it all again in just a year's time. In just a fortnight, this accountant had had three small businesses come to him with insurmountable problems due to this change. Given there are thousands of similarly sized accountancy practices, I can only imagine the likely scale of this problem.

The irony for the accountant I spoke to is that, due to the difficulty of navigating this new system, he has resorted to submitting paper tax returns by mail. This is leading to enormous stress, as fines keep accruing for unpaid tax and the process to have the fines forgiven has its own challenges. I've heard from constituents who have effectively been forced into unreasonable payment plans because the alternative is enforced liquidation. Businesses used to have a case worker to help them negotiate a repayment plan, but these too are gone. Instead, people are basically trying to negotiate with an unresponsive computer system. Quite simply, small businesses haven't been appropriately educated, and the time and resources to help them are nowhere to be found.

If robodebt has taught us anything, it should be that government procedures can be destructive and have a destructive impact on individuals when people's lived experiences are not heeded. Yet I am concerned we are witnessing something similar in relation to small businesses and the ATO. Given this, I urge the government, as a matter of urgency, to please act now to modify harmful processes, while it's the alarm that's sounding rather than livelihoods and lives collapsing.