Coalition would ‘entirely reverse’ botched TASA regs

The Federal Opposition has signalled it would entirely reverse the regulations flowing from the Tax Agent Services (Code of Professional Conduct) Determination.

The two key opposition frontbenchers covering the Financial Services portfolio, Luke Howarth and Senator Dean Smith signalled their intention despite the Government ceding substantial ground to the major accounting and planning groups, including on the so-called ‘dob-in’ provisions.

Howarth and Smith acknowledged that the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services, Stephen Jones, had relented on the regulations but said “it should not take the threat of two disallowance motions from both the Coalition and the Senate crossbench” to achieve such an outcome.

“After repeatedly dismissing outrage from tax practitioners and insisting the regulation was ‘a modest set of obligations’, the Assistant Treasurer capitulated and finally admitted the regulation was defective and that significant changes were required after a Senate vote on disallowance was negatived 31 votes to 31 votes last month,” a joint statement from Howarth and Smith said.

“The Government has since scrambled to fix this botched regulation, with it continuing to be rewritten up until the eleventh-hour yesterday. With just hours before imminent disallowance, the Assistant Treasurer signed off on a new instrument and backed down at the last minute, once again.”

They noted that Jones had commenced public consultation, for a period of just five business days, eleven weeks after the Tax Agent Services (Code of Professional Conduct) Determination 2024 was made law.

“This is bad government and not a standard tax practitioners and their professional bodies should accept. It is also more costly red tape for small businesses which will be passed on to their clients at a time they can least afford it.”

The opposition politicians said the rewrite “makes minor improvements to the most contentious aspects of the regulation”.

“Although this might make compliance slightly easier for large firms, small firms and individual practitioners will still be left with an unnecessary and burdensome compliance nightmare,” they said.

“These smaller tax practitioners remain distraught, disappointed and fed up with how the Government has treated them. They do not want this new red tape in any form and do not accept the Government’s last-ditch attempt to ‘fix’ this flawed regulation.”

“It’s too little, too late and only a Coalition Government would entirely reverse these regulations and unwind this attack on local accountants, bookkeepers and tax agents from Labor and the Greens.”