Costs forcing accountants to disengage with clients
Financial advisers are not the only professionals unloading lower value clients, with accountants also acknowledging having to make tough decisions in the face of increasing regulations and higher costs.
The situation has been made clear by Chartered Accountants ANZ in a submission to the Taxation Ombudsman’s review of the Australian Taxation Office work plan.
CA-ANZ raised specific issues with the ombudsman, including difficulties accountants encountered in dealing with the ATO.
“Our members are concerned about difficulties in resolving matters with the ATO in a timely manner, inconsistent and sometimes aggressive approaches by the ATO, and the functionality of Online Services for Agents,” it said.
“These matters impose administrative costs which result in higher fees for taxpayers and or/higher costs for tax practitioners.”
“When higher costs cannot be passed on to taxpayers, tax practitioners must make difficult decisions about disengaging clients, leaving some taxpayers without needed tax practitioner assistance,” CA-ANZ said.
The major accounting body said it had undertaken a survey of members asking them to vote on their top four priority areas for 2026 which had garnered 464 responses.
That survey revealed the following as priorities:
- ATO’s management of remission of general interest charge (66%)
- ATO’s Client-Agent Linking system (65%)
- ATO’s management of compromised accounts (46%)
- ATO’s Online Services for Agents 43%
The submission also noted that 46% of respondents had listed pay day superannuation as a high priority, noting that CA-ANZ and other industry bodies were calling for a two year delay to the start of the new regime.
“Much needs to be done from a legislative and system perspective to ensure that Pay Day Super can be implemented appropriately,” it said. “Given the strong push to delay the start of Pay Day Super, it may be more appropriate for this proposed review to be put on hold.”
Canberra only manufactures one product = Red Tape.
And they make an absolute crap load of it, week after week, after week.
And somehow these Canberra pollies & bureaucratic muppets can’t work out why productivity is so stuffed.
In fact, it would seem like Agents are not welcome in the ATO’s “taxpayer engagement”. If they saw them as a genuine part of creating efficiencies etc, there issues raised by the associations would be less pronounced.
Sure the ATO is under-resourced but that is not a new thing. They also are banking on tech doing some of the work especially for individual tax returns etc but there is no excuse not to embrace the role of accountants in a functioning tax administration process. The resourcing prioritisation is probably the thing to look at.
This was all very predictable.
It should be such an easy task to remove the red tape which is not helping anybody.
Advisers hate it and clients hate it.
It hasn’t been done because the powers that be don’t want it done.