Australian Tax Office Slashes 4700 Staff, Brings In $250,000-A-Year Spin Doctor
The Australian Tax Office is hiring a $250,000-a-year media wrangler to sell the idea revenue collection will not fall but its own figures show each of the 4700 staff walking out the door collect an average of $23 million in taxes.
Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan's newest senior executive will respond to "high profile, high risk" media enquiries and craft the single most important message the organisation needs to send to the public: that cutbacks to staff numbers will not have any "material impact" on revenue collection.
The ATO's assistant commissioner of public affairs will help Commissioner Jordan brief Assistant Treasurer Mathias Cormann on tax collection which needs to be maintained even though 3000 staff left by October and another 1700 were scheduled to go.
An ATO spokeswoman said it was an existing position currently occupied under acting arrangements due to a permanent transfer out of the role.
Selling the idea tax revenue will not be hurt as staff numbers are slashed could be a hire wire act. ATO figures used in a report tabled in the House of Representatives on Monday show each Tax Office employee represents $23.58 million of tax collected - many millions of dollars more than agents in three comparable first-world nations.
ATO employees collect on average $10 million more revenue than counterparts in the United Kingdom ($14.7 million), New Zealand ($14 million) and Ireland ($13 million).
Australia's "gross revenue collected per staff member" figure was also almost on par with Norway ($25.9 million) and Denmark ($25.2 million).
The original source of the comparison table is the OECD's Forum on Tax Administration.
The ATO provided the figures to the committee to show how Australia's cost of tax collection had improved in recent years.
But top Tax Office bureaucrats do not want the figures used to argue revenue collection will drop when staff numbers are slashed.
The report by parliament's standing committee on tax and revenue quoted the ATO's second commissioner Neil Olesen who was confident tax collection - so vital when the Abbott government was trying to find savings everywhere - would not be hurt.
Mr Olesen said it was a "simplistic view that you just divide the revenue base by the number of officers in the organisation and that equates to revenue per head of the person working in the organisation".
"That is just not how it works," he said.
"The variety of functions that people do, the variety of risks they might address, the kind of work they do varies enormously.
"You certainly cannot apply a simplistic average to every person and say that for everyone who works in the organisation they bring in this amount of money."
The latest available figures which could be compared showed that in 2011 Australia collected $361.3 billion with 18,196 full time equivalent staff.
Staff numbers and revenue collection have increased since then.
The number of ATO staff was now about 20,000 and collected $419 billion in gross tax last financial year.
This news story is reprinted from www.smh.com.au
Read more details on Outsourced Practice Management Services
Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan's newest senior executive will respond to "high profile, high risk" media enquiries and craft the single most important message the organisation needs to send to the public: that cutbacks to staff numbers will not have any "material impact" on revenue collection.
The ATO's assistant commissioner of public affairs will help Commissioner Jordan brief Assistant Treasurer Mathias Cormann on tax collection which needs to be maintained even though 3000 staff left by October and another 1700 were scheduled to go.
An ATO spokeswoman said it was an existing position currently occupied under acting arrangements due to a permanent transfer out of the role.
Selling the idea tax revenue will not be hurt as staff numbers are slashed could be a hire wire act. ATO figures used in a report tabled in the House of Representatives on Monday show each Tax Office employee represents $23.58 million of tax collected - many millions of dollars more than agents in three comparable first-world nations.
ATO employees collect on average $10 million more revenue than counterparts in the United Kingdom ($14.7 million), New Zealand ($14 million) and Ireland ($13 million).
Australia's "gross revenue collected per staff member" figure was also almost on par with Norway ($25.9 million) and Denmark ($25.2 million).
The original source of the comparison table is the OECD's Forum on Tax Administration.
The ATO provided the figures to the committee to show how Australia's cost of tax collection had improved in recent years.
But top Tax Office bureaucrats do not want the figures used to argue revenue collection will drop when staff numbers are slashed.
The report by parliament's standing committee on tax and revenue quoted the ATO's second commissioner Neil Olesen who was confident tax collection - so vital when the Abbott government was trying to find savings everywhere - would not be hurt.
Mr Olesen said it was a "simplistic view that you just divide the revenue base by the number of officers in the organisation and that equates to revenue per head of the person working in the organisation".
"That is just not how it works," he said.
"The variety of functions that people do, the variety of risks they might address, the kind of work they do varies enormously.
"You certainly cannot apply a simplistic average to every person and say that for everyone who works in the organisation they bring in this amount of money."
The latest available figures which could be compared showed that in 2011 Australia collected $361.3 billion with 18,196 full time equivalent staff.
Staff numbers and revenue collection have increased since then.
The number of ATO staff was now about 20,000 and collected $419 billion in gross tax last financial year.
This news story is reprinted from www.smh.com.au
Read more details on Outsourced Practice Management Services
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