‘A real win-win:’ Tax Ombudsman previews early findings of OSfA Review

“One of the overwhelming comments that came to me was actually [that] agents really don't want to be using the phone. They would love to just get all their work done online through the online services,” Owen said.

“I feel like there's a real win-win here. So the Tax Office clearly wants call demand to go down because it's overwhelmed with calls. The agents say their preferred channel is online, but only if ATO could make certain things available online.”

Owen said the review would seek to understand the tasks that tax agents could currently complete through OSfA; and, more importantly, the tasks that agents wanted to do online but could not.

The review would also seek to bring the ATO’s attention to small snags that tax agents faced when accessing online services. For example, when the ATO created reports for tax agents, they often included taxpayers’ tax file numbers (TFNs), forcing agents to redact documents manually.

“Why can’t the ATO do the redaction?” Owen said.

She added that the review would also look into the function of Practice Mail, and whether it could be transformed into a more synchronous method of communication.

“It's the one safe channel that agents can transact with the ATO. But it's not really a two way channel. Somebody said to me, it's a sort of electronic version of pigeon post,” she said.

“[The ATO knows] that channel is a little bit out of date, and agents say they want something better, that they can have that two way communication.”

In March, tax agents also raised concerns about delays with the ATO’s new online general interest charge (GIC) remission forms, introduced to improve consistency and predictability in GIC remission outcomes.

Tax agents said there was already a significant backlog of work sitting in OSFA, which they did not believe would improve until the ATO increased the resources dedicated to handling remissions.

Owen said the ATO had acknowledged the delays but anticipated they would clear up as the team became more established.

“To solve the problem of inconsistency, they've created this whole new team and a new form and everything,” she said.

“It’s very early days. Some of those people are still being trained. So the ATO was very transparent and said, we think this is going to be better, but can you just allow a little bit of time to get this straight?

“Agents are right to say … delays have occurred. And of course, that means agents think this form is to blame, whereas actually, it's just about getting the [ATO] people trained up.”