The Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, chaired by Independent MP, Rob Oakeshott, has called for the Australian Taxation Office to report back in six months on action it has taken to improve complaint handing and to address the causes of complaints.

 

In its report on the eighth biannual hearing with the Commissioner of Taxation, the Joint Committee expressed concerns about the ATO’s performance in handling complaints and the increase in the number of complaints received. It acknowledged that the increase in complaints had coincided with implementation of the ATO’s  Information and Communication Technology (ICT) change program which began seven years ago.

 

The ATO said that implementation of the new integrated core processing system as part of the change program had caused some delays to the processing of refunds, which caused complaints to spike over the past twelve months.

 

However, the ATO stated that, while the complaint levels in the past year have been higher than normal, the bulk of the complaints that were received during that time period have now been resolved.

 

The Commissioner said that superannuation was a very complex area because of the number of stakeholders that needed to be linked – such as employer, employee, funds and the ATO. He added that the potential changes arising from the Cooper Review in addition to the complexity of the area would require some redevelopment of the ATO’s systems that deal with superannuation.

 

The Joint Committee also requested details in the next submission of the 900 current cases of compromised tax file numbers, and the steps taken by the ATO to resolve them.  Another area of concern was “the seemingly ad hoc levels of consultation [by the Government] with the ATO when it comes to policy design”.

 

Tabling the Committee’s report in Parliament, Mr Oakeshott said that in keeping with the goal of increasing scrutiny of the ATO, the Committee would be enlarging future biannual hearings to include public evidence from external scrutiny and integrity bodies such as the Ombudsman, the Australian National Audit Office and the Inspector General of Taxation as well as from peak industry and consumer bodies.

 

The report of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit is available here