In a keynote address to a tax professional association in Tasmania in October, the ATO’s Second Commissioner, Law Design and Practice, Andrew Mills, spoke about the ATO’s new program of work “Better as usual”.
The initiative is focused on finding realistic ways that the ATO can improve its processes and avoid both the incidence and the impact of cases where things go awry — especially with its interactions with the important small business community.
“Recently we released the 2015-16 tax performance measures for the small business market,” Mills said. “And the results showed that Australian small businesses are doing a great job when it comes to paying their tax. They voluntarily paid $76 billion in income, representing about 87.5% of the tax owed.”
Mills stated that this was a good result, and that it was comparable to similar jurisdictions around the world. He said the tax performance measures also show that an estimated 60% of the gap (or approximately $7 billion) is due to the black economy, “meaning that the vast majority of those trying to do the right thing are keeping up with their obligations”, he said.
“Now don’t misunderstand me,” Mills said. “When I talk about how well this market is performing, I’m not trying to sell short the difficulty of running a small business. We hear from small businesses every day and we know how hard it can be for them to juggle the many demands on their time and resources. They have ideas for how we could be doing better, and we’re listening.”
Three key attributes of successful small businesses
He then went on to point out the attributes that the ATO has found, over many years of dealing with the issues that can plague a smaller business, are key to the success of every enterprise. Readmore
