Chris Jordan AO, Commissioner of Taxation, Australian Taxation Office
Speech delivered to the Public Sector Network's Innovate Australia 2022 event.
12 August 2022
Check against delivery.
Introduction
Hello and thank you for having me.
It’s nice to be here in person, in a room with so many people. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to have events like this.
When I was preparing for this speech, I was reflecting on what we’ve all been through in the last couple of years. There is one particular moment that really takes me back.
I was called to a meeting at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney, and to get there I drove over the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
It was a Sunday night and it wasn’t late, but there were no other cars on the road.
It was the eeriest feeling; the whole city was deserted.
Of course, it was March 2020, and Sydney had just gone into its first lockdown.
I was there to answer a question I had been asked five days earlier.
The government were going to provide financial support to Australians, and they wanted to know if we could deliver it.
They gave us five days to figure it out, and they wanted to see me in person when I gave them the commitment we could.
In the room at the CPO, I was joined by my colleague Second Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn and in front of us on screens were members of the Government’s Expenditure Review Committee, including then Prime Minister Scott Morrison, then Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and then Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann.
You can imagine how I might have felt, sitting there, and saying to them pretty confidently: ‘Yes, we can do it.’
That night was when we committed to deliver what would eventually become $89 billion in JobKeeper, $39 billion in Early Release of Super and $36 billion in Cash Flow Boost, totalling $164 billion in financial support for Australians when they needed it most.
A brief history of transformational change at the ATO
Obviously, we didn’t just pull a rabbit out of a hat. Our ability to say, ‘we can do it’ and actually pull it off, was because of investments in our people and digital capability we had started to make a number of years earlier.
In 2013, when I was appointed Commissioner of Taxation, I had a mandate from the government to change the organisation.
The ATO had a reputation for being somewhat rigid, hard to deal with, and not quite contemporary in its client service.
I set out to modernise the organisation and bring our services in line with community expectations.
It was a huge task and some of my friends at the time said it couldn’t be done.
‘That’s a big ship in the ocean, and it’s going to be impossible to turn it around,’ they said.
I’m glad I didn’t listen to them.
When I got in the door, there was a surprising willingness from staff to change, and they were full of ideas for how to do things better.
Our external stakeholders knew their irritants all too well and they too, welcomed change.
Following a period of listening and consulting, we released a Blueprint for change and launched a program called ‘Reinventing the ATO’.
We started by identifying our mission, which is to ‘contribute to the economic and social wellbeing of Australians by fostering willing participation in our tax and super systems.’
Then we developed our vision for where we wanted to be in 2020, which was to be ‘a leading tax and super administration, known for our contemporary service, expertise, and integrity’.
After a number of years of strong and consistent focus on cultural transformation and staff experience, to become a more service-oriented organisation, we moved beyond Reinvention and refocused on two aspirations to guide us Towards 2024:
- ‘building trust and confidence,’ and
- ‘being streamlined, integrated and being a truly data driven organisation’.
We set out to simplify interactions with us by embedding what we could into natural systems, and to make it easier for taxpayers to get it right (and hard not to).
We knew to keep pace with the world around us, we needed to better use digital and data.
Single Touch Payroll
One of our signature initiatives to better use digital and data, was a program called Single Touch Payroll (STP).
STP was a government initiative designed to reduce businesses’ reporting burdens to government, tackle black economy behaviour and make sure businesses played fair and met their obligations.
STP works within existing payroll software systems, so reporting to us happens as part of an employers’ usual payroll process – sharing data about salaries and wages, pay-as-you-go withholdings, and superannuation directly to the ATO in real-time.
Once STP is enabled, employers don’t need to take additional steps to report to us which reduces duplication and record keeping requirements.
It also means employees have visibility that their employer is meeting their obligations, and so do we.
Of course, we had no idea when we first started working on it –it would end up being a big part of the government’s response to a pandemic nobody saw coming.
JobKeeper
Together with the Fiscal group in Treasury, we designed the JobKeeper payments around the systems we had already built for STP which facilitated fast and efficient delivery, but more importantly, ensured integrity.
When an employer applied for JobKeeper and said they had eight employees, we knew whether that was true or not based on their regular payroll reporting.
It also meant we could move quickly.
Within 6 weeks we built the system and started making payments, 97% of which were made within 4 business days from application.
STP data went on to be shared across other government agencies in those first years of the pandemic.
We shared de-identified STP data with the ABS and important stimulus information with Treasury which enabled them to see almost in real-time how the economy was tracking and shape government response accordingly. Previously they relied on quarterly reporting and made decisions based on data that was effectively already outdated. And later, we shared it with state governments to help the administration of their own pandemic payments.
We now also share STP data with Services Australia and Department of Education to help them deliver welfare payments and improve services for their customers.
And we know this is just scraping the surface of how we can use this data to achieve enhanced outcomes across government.
The ATO’s data store is not only significant, but one of the largest in Australia, and we know sharing this across government will help us all deliver better client services and better outcomes for Australians.
So, how do we keep it going? How do we sustain the transformation in 2022 and beyond?
Some of you might also be asking how do we start?
I’ve got 3 key lessons from our transformational change journey to share with you.
Firstly,
It starts with a vision
Transformational change always starts with a vision.
To get anywhere, you first need to define where you want to be.
Make the vision very clear, simple, and easy to understand.
Repeat it often – so often that you think people are sick of hearing it.
It’s not worth anything if your people don’t know it and aren’t invested in it as well.
Storytelling is a valuable tool in achieving this. Tell stories to help people understand the vision and why you need to change to achieve that vision.
You need everyone to know their role in achieving it and how their work contributes.
If I asked you to say it right now, would you know your organisation’s vision? Do you know how your role contributes to it? What about the people in your team, would they know? This is SO important, because when people are clear on the vision, they won’t just be on board, they’ll be in the driver’s seat with you.
Secondly,
Digital and data aren’t everything
I’m sure at an Innovate Australia conference I don’t have to tell you data and digital are vital to continued transformation.
Our experience with the stimulus measures showed us just how important, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they are the most important investments an organisation can make.
This might be a controversial thing to say at a digital transformation conference – but they’re not.
The most important investment is in the staff experience.
Too often, our only focus is the client experience. In some ways this is understandable – we exist to serve the public, and we can’t forget the individual experiences of those who interact with us.
The reality is, the key to delivering a good client experience is a good staff experience. Having the right people in the roles, having the right culture, and having the right leadership are what sets you up for success.
That’s why when I started at the ATO, the staff experience was one of my top priorities. I am absolutely of the view that to deliver a better client experience you need to first deliver a better staff experience.
That’s why I put staff at the heart of the Reinventing the ATO program and our Blueprint for change. Having the right digital capabilities is very important, but more important is the right culture.
Our digital capabilities helped us deliver the government’s stimulus package. But it was having the right culture in place that really made it possible.
We pulled the best of the best together into a Core Design Team. People from across our organisation worked extremely long hours for 4 weeks straight on the design. Then more than 5,000 staff willingly moved from their usual roles to help deliver the support.
Our people were united by an increased sense of purpose and a clear need in the community, and they went above and beyond to get the job done.
If you want to maximise your use of data and technology, you need to empower your people. Technology will never wholly replace human expertise.
Finally,
There is no end date
When it’s done well, transformation won’t stop at a certain date.
In those initial years of Reinventing the ATO, as we experienced success and saw the initial, big changes in the organisation, there were many points along the way where deciding the job was done would have been easy.
You need to be realistic about the timeframe involved in making change happen and treat the process like a marathon, not a sprint.
Often there is an initial rush of enthusiasm and momentum, and then, because change is hard and takes time, people get disheartened or lose focus.
You don’t need continual ‘Big Bangs’ like our Reinvention.
What you absolutely do need is a laser-like focus on the implementation of your vision – segmented into manageable programs delivering tangible outcomes.
All too often, great strategies are developed but never fully implemented. Implementation is the core to successful transformation, and if you want to stay at the forefront it can never stop. To stay a leading organisation, you need to keep improving incrementally. You’re either getting better or you’re going backwards – particularly in a service organisation.
Never stop striving to improve.
A side benefit is that people want to be associated with a successful, contemporary organisation, particularly if it contributes to the social and economic wellbeing of Australians.
Conclusion
Almost two and a half years on from that meeting in March 2020, traffic is well and truly back on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
But sitting in the gridlock on my commute now serves to remind me that it’s impossible to know what is ahead, but you will be best prepared for it if you focus on the staff experience, the culture of your organisation and maintaining contemporary digital and data capabilities.
So,
- Be clear on your vision and communicate it often
- Invest in data and digital yes, but make sure staff are at the heart of everything you do, and,
- Balance ambition with action, and champion even the smallest improvements.
It’s not always possible to know exactly where the journey will lead, but when you look back you will see how each small step along the way took you a little further and equipped you to respond to the unknown.
The Commissioner's address to the Public Sector Network's 8th Annual Innovate Australia 2022 event.