ATO Announces Changes Due To Affect Business Tax Payers

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

14 February 2008

The Australian Taxation Office has this week warned business taxpayers that it is planning a shutdown of services during March this year.

In a statement on its website, the ATO announced that:

"You may have heard over the past few months that we are shutting down our systems over the Easter break to make significant improvements to our processing systems."

"Our plan was to upgrade the processing systems for income tax and FBT components during this shutdown. We have been testing these systems and, while we’re confident the FBT component is ready to go, the new income tax functionality is not testing as well."

"We have always said the last thing we’ll do is implement system changes that have the potential to seriously impact business and the community.With this in mind we believe there are significant risks in going ahead with the income tax changes at this time."

It continued: "We have decided to rollout FBT as planned and continue testing income tax until we are satisfied it is ready.We will roll out the new system for income tax when we are more comfortable about its reliability, and we are exploring the best time for this."

Explaining the likely impact on taxpayers, the tax authority stated that:

"The ATO's systems will be shutdown from 2pm AEDT Thursday 20 March through to 24 March (Easter Monday) to coincide with the Easter holiday."

"During this period the business and tax agent portals will not be available."

It concluded: "Lodgement of monthly and quarterly business activity statements will not be affected."

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