Do you trust your tax accountant?

Mike Taylor

Managing Editor and Publisher

24 September 2021

People may be losing faith in the Government and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) but they still have faith in their tax accountants.

That is one of the bottom lines of a new study conducted by accounting organisations the Association of Chartered Certified Accounts (ACCA), Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ) and the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) which marked the standing of professional tax accountants higher than that for professional tax lawyers.

It said that professional tax accountants had the highest level of trust in the system at 55%, followed by professional tax lawyers 50% which compared to the least trusted group – politicians on 22%.

The report said that trust in government tax authorities (globally) is polarised, with 43% saying they have trust or a high level of trust in the tax authorities, but 22% saying they distrust them.

“Overall, trust in government tax bodies has slightly increased,” it said.

Elsewhere, the report findings suggest that there is a suspicion with respect to high income earners and big corporates with respect to how much tax they are paying.

“In Australia, 55% thought average or low-income people paid a reasonable amount of tax, but just 5% believed the same applied for high income earners, which was much lower than the 24% result across G20 countries,” the report found.

It also found that while 31% believed that local Australian companies were likely to be paying a reasonable amount of tax, 27% thought multinational corporations were paying too little tax.