ATO
ATO is getting very active. All captial gains & trusts are going through the data mining detectors.
But getting a letter from ATO may not all be bad, some are getting letters that thank the taxpayers for following CORRECT PROCEDURES.
Surplus
The Labor Party is pushing for surplus after KRUDD keynesian stimulus that produce nothing for the economy except heartaches of FHOG housing loans.
These Aussie pollies can be dumb at times, but obviously, he is getting his priority right this time.
Cannot blame him for giving some hope for be beleaguered western countries.
GST
The GST revenue collected from WA is now used to fund SA, NSW and TAS. A lot of people are angry. we only get back 29 cents for every $1.
The equivalent is like Germany putting $1 into the Euro pool and get back only 29c, whereas Greeks put in $1 and get back $1.50.
If this is short term, this type of redistribution is fine, because it is like insurance and we do not want Tasmania to become too poor since it is part of Australia.
This former Box Hill boy finally bring out the tax reform topic.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...-cultural-change/story-e6frg9if-1226435172729
Heavy-handed tax office needs cultural change
BY: TONY SMITH From: The Australian July 26, 2012 12:00AM
THERE'S the bully pulpit and then there's just plain bullying. And while governments at their best lift us up through inspiration, governments at their worst cast us down through intimidation.
For months, the business community has been awash with horror stories about hyper-aggressive and ultra-erratic enforcement strategies employed by an Australian tax office on steroids.
Of course, taxes are the price we pay for civilisation. A taxless world would degenerate into the state of anarchy described Thomas Hobbes in his famous passage from Leviathan: "no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
Yet for a tax system to be constructive, it must be fair, stable, efficient and predictable. And it must be remembered that governments generate no wealth, and thus have no money of their own.
The dollars in public coffers have all been taken through the coercive power of the state from the businesses and individuals whose hard work and innovation generates wealth, jobs and technological progress. An optimal taxation system will achieve a balance between the requirement to collect sufficient revenue for legitimate governance and the need to preserve the private-sector golden goose that is the ultimate source of our prosperity.
And while the dialogue on tax policy mostly revolves around thresholds and marginal tax rates, talk has lately focused on the heavy-handed enforcement methods deployed by the ATO.
But don't just take my word for it. The Inspector-General of Taxation cited complaints of intimidation and arbitrary decision-making in its recently released "Review of Compliance Approaches to Small and Medium Enterprises". Large corporations can deploy their armies of lawyers and accountants to contest the ATO on its own terms. But small businesses operating on a proverbial shoe string don't have law and accounting firms on retainer at their beck and call. And it's the absence of ready access to what I call the shielding professions that makes modestly sized companies vulnerable to abuse by ATO officers who are ignorant or officious or both.
In their submissions to the Inspector General, many SMEs complained of arbitrary rulings made by staff lacking the technical or legal expertise to make informed decisions. In one instance, the tax adviser paid for by a private-sector company ended up "providing lessons in the accounting and tax treatment of the areas under review" to clueless ATO staff.
This "my way or the highway" attitude is bad enough. But it gets worse when tax rulings are successfully challenged in the courts and the ATO then moves the goalposts by getting the government to change the law retrospectively.
This lack of tax certainty inevitably constrains economic growth by leaving businesses and individuals wondering what assault on their bottom line might lurk around the next corner. And while much uncertainty in the present day derives from the Gillard government's ill-conceived mining tax and ill-advised carbon tax, the administration of the tax system also has a substantial impact on investment and expansion decisions. It's a key component of national competitiveness.
There's no such thing as perfection in government, and we don't pretend that tax administration was flawless when the Coalition was last in office. But there's also no denying that in recent years the ATO has drifted badly off course.
It's only natural that public servants will respond to the guidance, implicit and explicit, coming from their political masters. And with Wayne Swan desperate to fulfil his promise of a budget surplus in 2013, it's hardly surprising that the ATO has adopted a hyper-aggressive approach. The message coming from the government is clear: raise what you can, where you can, as often as you can.
And with that in mind, an incoming Abbott government will adopt a conscious strategy of driving a cultural metamorphosis within the ATO. Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey has announced a plan to appoint four additional second commissioners.
These positions would be part-time roles filled by individuals who have experience from the real world of business. And they will assist the ATO in comprehending the needs of the private sector far better than now is the case. This is the first instalment in a suite of policies designed to ensure that the legitimate collection of taxes serves not to stifle prosperity but enhance it.
Liberal MP Tony Smith is the federal Coalition's spokesman on tax reform.
