Speaking on the CA Catalyst podcast, Commissioner of Taxation Chris Jordan said that he could not guarantee that the ATO’s systems would be perfect in the future, despite the establishment of its Improving ATO IT Systems (IAIS) Program.
“We’ve also got to realise that we have a huge system with a lot of moving parts and an enormous amount of data coming through the systems now than ever before, not only with Single Touch Payroll information but with all the data exchanges, the country by country reporting, the common reporting system- an enormous amount of information now coming in from other jurisdictions now hitting our systems,” said Mr Jordan.
“Not all our systems are as new as we would like them to be so it’s not like it’s just one big computer where you upgrade it- there is a huge number of parts to that.
“We’re going through a very detailed process of prioritising what we need to renew to provide better resilience to our overall system and this is an incredibly difficult and expensive project.”
“If I said to government, why don’t you give us $500 million a year for the next four years, we’ll have a great system for tax agents- we would have a much better, a much more resilient system,” he added.
“But the government has priorities and they’re not going to give us $500 million a year for the next four years for us to build the whiz-bang system to service agents so we have to deal within our own funding envelope; we have to make priorities in those decisions. We recognise agents are a hugely important partnership for us to make the system work but no system is going to be perfect.”
Instead, the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) has revealed that the government will provide $150.8 million over three years from 2019-20 to the Australian Taxation Office to improve its data storage and resilience of its security system.
Mr Jordan said practitioners should temper their expectations when it came to dealing with the ATO’s “enormous system”.
“We do get some stones thrown at us when something doesn’t work or a date was wrong on a letter but you know what- that’s going to happen, there will always be little things that go wrong so I just ask agents to sometimes think of the much bigger picture and think of the volume and stress and the moving parts we have in this enormous system,” said Mr Jordan.
“So if one of two things don’t look right to you, well I’m sorry but I can’t guarantee that there won’t be things like that in the future.”
Agree with Mark. I’m quite happy to accept that the ATO systems aren’t perfect. But they also need to understand that accountants/tax agents have systems that aren’t perfect either. Constant updates are expensive and not necessarily beneficial. Putting in place extremely strict and short deadlines with no leeway and potentially devastating consequences is causing a lot of unnecessary stress for us.
The ATO can say as often as they like that they value tax agents but the proof is in the pudding. Almost everything they do tells a different story. Every day as a Tax Agent I get to wear the cost of their inefficiencies. If it was an exam, I would score them a C+ at best. A+ for some of the ATO staff though. I cannot imagine the grief they get every day and yet some still help dealing with the ATOs creaking systems with a smile on their face.
The Commissioner should also accept that agents, small businesses & smsf’s are not perfect and allow them the same latitude as he is expecting that we provide him. It’s a two way matter and lately that is not happening as the Commissioner ramps up enforcement. Get ride of the debt collection agents who are over zealous and quite unprofessional & aggressive. Commissioner you get back what you dish up!