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You’ll be aware that our biggest campaigning push over the last two years has been for major reform to the ATO. Here’s the history of our battle.

We’ve congratulated both the Morrison Coalition and Shorten’s Labor for recognising that there are big problems with the ATO’s mistreatment of small business people. The evidence is overwhelming.

What’s been important is that both Morrison and Shorten have responded. More...

It doesn’t seem to stop. The ATO continues to deny that it does anything wrong, but official reviews and reports keep slamming the ATO. We listed in early April this year the string of parliamentary and other reports calling for urgent reform of the ATO.

This time it’s the Small Business Ombudsman reporting on the ATO’s enforcing debt even while the debt is being challenged in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The report finds that the ATO does this on 12 per cent of occasions. This destroys the small business and their ability to challenge the alleged debt. The Ombudsman severely criticizes the ATO and calls for legislative reform.  More...

Now that the federal election has been called (18 May) the importance of how self-employed people vote can be understood.

Demographer Bernard Salt gives an excellent analysis in this article from The Australian. Salt draws on ABS small business activity data calibrated to electoral boundaries. He looks at demographic changes between the last election in 2016 and now. He focuses on sole trader and small business activity.  More...

It is one year to the day since the Four Corners show ‘Mongrel Bunch of Bastards’ was aired. This ABC production exposed the ATO’s mistreatment of small business people. Watch the show here.  It continues to be relevant.

So, what has happened in 12 months? More...

You might recall the campaign hullaballoo we generated in late 2017 when the ATO cancelled the ABNs of 16 low-income, work-from-home, self-employed women. The ATO ‘assessed’ the women as employees. The denial of ABNs destroyed their incomes and forced many on to welfare. After 13 weeks of intense campaigning, the ATO ‘temporarily’ reinstated their ABNs.

The weird thing about this situation was that when we asked if any of the women were not paying their required tax, the ATO replied that it didn’t know. We checked and verified that all the women were paying tax as required. The ATO’s job is to collect tax. But in this case the ATO didn’t care about tax compliance. We discovered another agenda. We confirmed that powerful forces in the ATO are obsessed with the thought that there is something wrong about self-employed people. The ATO seeks to stop people being contractors whether or not tax compliance is occurring. This is the ATO acting well outside of its remit.  More...

We wrote yesterday to thank the many players involved in efforts to reform the ATO’s treatment of self-employed, small business people. Today we explain what that reform is and why it’s important.

The reform is the creation of the Small Business Tax Tribunal (SBTT) that started on 1 March. It’s a division within the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. There are two key documents to understand: More...

Okay, get ready for it. In this update we’re going to praise a lot of people.

The reason is that it’s looking as though the sort of reform we need from the ATO in its treatment of small business people is actually happening. See this article in today’s Australian.

It's all to do with this document released on the ATO’s website last Friday (22 March). Frankly, we’re surprised how far this is developing. We’ll explain this in detail tomorrow with the key being the operation of the Small Business Tax Tribunal.  More...

We recently discussed the re-emerging campaign against self-employment being cooked up principally by unions and the Labor ‘left’. We’ve seen this over many decades and this time the ‘evil’ is the gig economy. More...

Last Thursday (14 March), the current Australian Taxation Commissioner delivered a major speech.

He said of himself: More...

According to demographer Bernard Salt, there’s a big cultural shift in Australia towards being your own boss. And it’s a lifestyle thing. In The Australian Bernard referred to: More...