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We want to ensure that people are helped and assisted to understand their rights and responsibilities and are able to fulfil their obligations easily at minimal cost.
To help, we offer a vast range of services to meet taxpayers' needs to ensure that they can easily meet their obligations. We believe that most taxpayers want to comply with their obligations but may need information and assistance products from time to time to help them do so with certainty.
We continue to improve our website so that it is a useful and practical resource for tax and superannuation practitioners, individuals, businesses and non profit organisations to support them in relation to Australia's tax and superannuation systems.
Our phone services provide personalised support to the community and tax practitioners. We receive approximately 11 million phone enquiries each year.
We also provide a large range of electronic support tools that provide key information, guidance and practical advice to help reduce compliance costs for individuals, business and tax practitioners. We also provide other services such as web casts, live chats, email broadcasts, publications, seminars and visits.
People can subscribe and receive regular focussed publications providing sources of advice of our compliance activities and issues. Most, including The Tax Agent and BAS Agent magazines are online and provide direct links to timely information.
Our small business assistance program provides focussed practical support to small and micro businesses. The program provides information that makes obligations easier to understand and delivers the information in a way best suited to business. The program is currently working with over 300 industry and professional organisations with an estimated membership of 1.4 million small businesses.
E tax and pre filling now makes the tax return process easier for individual taxpayers. Over 2 million taxpayers used pre filling to assist them to complete their tax returns. In addition, tax agents used pre filling on about 7 million occasions in 2009-10.
The Standard Business Reporting (SBR) initiative involves 12 government agencies at federal, state and territory levels. It is designed to reduce the business to government reporting burden and deliver cost savings estimated at $800 million per year once fully implemented.
We are modifying our systems, forms and electronic messages to support SBR. We have built web services to accept activity statements, payment summaries, tax file number declarations, and fringe benefits tax returns from the SBR channel from 1 July 2010. The taxonomy for the company income tax return and schedules is now available and the system to enable software developers to test and self certify will be available later in the year.
AUSkey, the new multi agency authentication system gives businesses a single credential to sign and send reports electronically to agencies in SBR's scope. AUSkey replaces the 11 existing user IDs and passwords currently required to sign and send reports electronically to those agencies.
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Last Modified: Wednesday, 15 December 2010