Page 10 - Transforming Tax Administration and Involving Stakeholders

We’ve made many improvements to our services and client experience over the course of
the program. Some of these include:

• offering a welcome package for small businesses when they are first established,
and making regular contact with them in their first year

• providing SMS reminders to remind habitual late lodgers and payers to lodge on
time

• taking an early engagement and resolution approach to disagreements such as
small business GST disputes and requests for private rulings

• starting a mental health initiative where we train staff to recognise indicators of
mental illness amongst small business owners.

One of the largest milestones in our reinvention journey is myTax, our new online annual tax
return system that allows clients to complete their returns in as little as 20 minutes. When it
launched in 2014 it was designed for clients with simple tax affairs, but we’ve continued to
develop it. It’s now available for all individual taxpayers, and more than three million people
used it this year. MyTax asks clients a series of questions to tailor their returns to their specific
circumstances. This contrasts with our old electronic tax return software, where each client
worked through 140 screens of information that were designed for tax circumstances of the
entire population of individual Australian taxpayers.

We’ve also produced a mobile app, which has been downloaded more than a million times.
We continue to update it and add new features. It can be used to record deductions and
expenses, lodge and track the progress of your tax return and enrol a voiceprint for easy
access to our telephone and online services.

While many of these new services and programs are oriented towards making it easy to
willingly participate in our tax system, many Australians feel strongly about taking action
against those who don’t do the right thing.

Earlier this year the Australian Government introduced a new Multinational Anti-Avoidance
Law (MAAL) to ensure that companies pay tax on earnings from activity they undertake in
Australia. We’ve been working with 175 multinationals to guide them in their transition into
compliant arrangements.

The Australian Government has also supported us to set up a new Tax Avoidance Taskforce,
which enhances our compliance programs that target multinationals, large public and
private groups and high-wealth individuals operating in Australia.

We are now taking on tax avoidance in a truly global capacity. Utilising my role as chair of
the Joint International Taskforce on Shared Intelligence and Collaboration (JITSIC), we are
working with the data leaked in the Panama Papers, as well as using numerous other data
sets we continue to receive. The exchange-of-information arrangements we employ to
receive this information has helped us raise more than $1 billion. Our communities and

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