Friday, October 30, 2026

Make them tell the truth - ATO, ASIC feared data breach by supplier VIQ Solutions

Public servants ‘treated appallingly’


The allegations were in response to a recent submission by the APC Secretaries Board on behalf of public servants to a parliamentary standards committee. Concerns raised included examples of behaviour that went beyond “robust discussion, accountability, and free-flowing questioning that you would have in a Senate committee”, said Australian Public Service Commissioner Jacqui Curtis. 


The intention of the submission was to bring attention to “circumstances and concerns around the wellbeing and safety of our officers appearing”, said Curtis, “and asking for the committee and parliamentarians to consider that with respect to your own code of behaviour and standards.”

Curtis said she stood by the submission “because we have an obligation as the leaders of the public service – in particular in my role as the public service commissioner – to be very diligent in making sure that our staff are not exposed to things that can harm their wellbeing. We are not trying to stop public servants giving full and frank answers in a committee hearing.” 


Greens Senator and committee member David Shoebridge objected to claims that such concerns were not taken seriously. “I am not aware of a single instance where a matter has been brought to the attention of the committee and it has not been treated with seriousness and has not been addressed,” he said.

Shoebridge admitted that senators can sometimes get frustrated with public servants who obfuscate and refuse to answer questions directly. “When answers are given of that nature, they will attract criticism. One of the clearest ways to avoid that criticism is for public servants to give direct, unambiguous answers to direct and unambiguous questions.”   



Make them tell the truth. Proposal to end the dishonesty and spin when public servants appear before Parliamentary Inquiries


Indian firm accessed Australian court files ‘Incredibly sensitive’ transcripts viewed.


Former Auscript manager Paul Cutbush says he made Public Interest Disclosures to the courts in 2014 about court data going offshore.


ATO, ASIC feared data breach by supplier VIQ Solutions a year before it was public

Internal emails between the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and the Australian Tax Office (ATO) exposed concerns that preferred government transcription provider, VIQ, had potentially offshored sensitive data, almost a year before the ABC first reported a court data breach by the same company.

The emails also show that ASIC, which was responsible for managing the relationship between VIQ as a preferred provider and government agencies, ignored an ATO request to assess whether other agencies had been impacted and instead left it up to VIQ.

The alarm was first raised around March 2025 when VIQ sent an email to the ATO that included a hyperlink to a transcript that was "available for download" from a site in the United Kingdom.

An assistant director at the ATO sent an email to both ASIC and VIQ stating:

"This appears to indicate the [sic] VIQ Solutions is already allowing customer data to be shared, accessed or used outside of Australia. This is of serious concern to the Australian Taxation Office."

The ATO and ASIC advised staff to stop using VIQ for transcription services until they had more information.

"We have requested that VIQ conduct an investigation and confirm that our data has not been sent overseas. We are also not utilising VIQ until the investigation is complete," an ASIC project coordinator wrote in an email chain that included ATO staff.

"If you haven't already, you may wish to request that a similar investigation is also completed for the ATO," the project coordinator wrote.

In the days that followed, concerns were raised about the integrity of the information being provided by VIQ in response to the potential breach.

"We have found some potential inconsistencies in VIQ response to date and more impacts the more questions we ask," an ATO director wrote.

By early May, VIQ had provided a report to ASIC about the potential breach. Based on the report, ASIC determined the incident was a "near miss" and that none of its own data had been compromised.

But there was no independent investigation into any other agency using the service.

An email from a project coordinator at ASIC on May 12, 2025 stated:

"Recently ASIC became aware of a potential data breach after Evidence Support Panel provider, VIQ, was thought to have sent ATO data processing offshore… This incident was determined to be a near miss, and we will work with VIQ to ensure that any risk mitigation and process improvements are implemented to ensure ongoing security..."


 Litigants in at least 146 court matters were potentially involved in a data breach that is now the subject of a formal complaint with the privacy commissioner in Canada, Senate estimates has been told.

 Greens senator David Shoebridge, who sits on the legal and constitutional affairs committee, said the numbers given by both courts were unreliable.

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Thursday, October 29, 2026

Frail in your 40s? What to know about ‘pre-frailty’ and how to reverse it

 Frail in your 40s? What to know about ‘pre-frailty’ and how to reverse it


When some women first walk into the gym at The Bone Clinic, their bones are thinning, their bodies are stooped, and they’re often leaning on a walking stick.
“They see people lifting heavy weights and say, ‘I could never do that’. But they do, and it’s not long before they’re standing straighter and carrying their own groceries,” says Professor Belinda Beck from the School of Allied Health, Sport Sciences and Social Work at Griffith University, and director of the Brisbane-based clinic which runs an exercise program to strengthen muscle and bone.
“Frailty isn’t inevitable with age, and it can be reversed. Our bread and butter is seeing people become functional again.”
Frailty might seem a long way off in your 40s, but research from Flinders University has found that almost half of 40- to 49-year-olds have what’s known as “pre-frailty”, meaning they already have signs of poor muscle strength and poor balance. But why?
You could blame convenience technology, like the computers, remote controls and robot lawn mowers that have stolen so much movement over the last few decades, but it’s more complex than that.
“In our study, pre-frailty was associated with more loneliness, more negative attitudes towards ageing, and having a sense of feeling older than your chronological age,” says researcher Dr Tom Brennan of Flinders University, one of the authors of a 2024 review of interventions to prevent or reverse pre-frailty and frailty.
“If we want to prevent frailty, we should ask more about what’s happening in someone’s life. How confident are they about being active? Do they see changes in their health as something they can work on improving, or something they have to accept as they get older?” he says.
“But part of the challenge is that people in middle age may think ‘frailty’ has nothing to do with them – talking about maintaining strength, confidence and the ability to keep doing things they enjoy may make prevention feel more relevant.”
Another reason to head off frailty sooner rather than later is new research linking frailty in older adults to a 74 per cent higher dementia risk. 
“Muscle is important for so many reasons as you get older. If you’re frail, you’re less able to engage in things that help prevent dementia, like physical activity and social interaction. If it’s becoming harder to go out, you might not be seeing friends, and we know that social connection is linked to dementia risk,” says Dr Katya Numbers from the UNSW Sydney’s Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) who did the research into frailty and dementia.
The effect of muscle loss on the brain may also be playing a part. When muscles exercise, they produce myokines (substances that help protect the brain), which may be part of why a University of Sydney study found that lifting weights slowed or stopped degeneration in parts of the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer’s.

But preventing frailty – now affecting more than 20 per cent of over 65s – isn’t always as simple as urging older people to pick up weights, Numbers says, adding that the CHeBA study also found living alone seemed to compound dementia risk in people who were frail.
“Frail older adults living alone had almost double the risk of dementia compared with robust adults living alone. We need to look at the whole person. You’re not going to sign up for strength training if you’re feeling lonely and miserable. ”
We should also let older people do things for themselves when they can, says Beck.
“Sometimes chivalrous husbands don’t let their wives lift heavy things ‘so they don’t hurt themselves’, but unfortunately this just makes it more likely their wives will become frail and less likely to be able to do things for themselves,” she says.
“If you lose that chivalrous husband or become his carer, suddenly you’ll be the one who has to do the heavy lifting.”
Her research at Griffith University into building bone strength is the basis of The Bone Clinic’s program. Called ONERO, it combines high-intensity resistance training and impact exercises with balance training. It’s supervised by exercise physiologists and available around Australia.
“I want to get the program available on the Medicare Benefits Schedule, so that cost isn’t a barrier. If more people could access strength training programs, the effect would be huge – we would have fewer hip fractures, and keep more people out of aged care. Ultimately, it’s about quality of life,” she says.
“The message that frailty isn’t a normal part of ageing and can be prevented needs to target people at all life stages – not just once you’ve crossed the threshold into frailty,” says Dr Coralie Wales who heads Strong Australia, a charity that promotes the importance of maintaining strength.
“If you lose physical strength, you lose the foundation of a healthy old age and your enjoyment of life.”


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Hacking Tax agents preparers: Poland busts crypto exchange

President signs new federal Romance Scam Prevention law; requires dating sites and apps to reach out to all who have interacted with anyone the site removes for fraudulent activity

 

FTC sends Congress its annual report on fraud affecting older consumers
  • Reported losses by those 60 or older went up 400% from 2020 to 2025, from $600 million to $3 billion
  • Top frauds by this cohort were investments (crypto romance frauds?) and business and government impersonation frauds
  • Most large losses were sent by bank to bank wire transfers or crypto
  • Older consumer less likely overall to be victims, but lose more money
New study on online shopping, our most common fraud, found that of 250,000 sites analyzed, 100,000 were frauds; now sites are using AI to make them look more real
 
Online Shopping Fraud. This topic is the largest source of fraud complaints.  People find fantastically low prices for goods on Facebook, and increasingly on Google searches. But the goods never arrive at all, or are counterfeit, and often goods that do get sent are completely different than those advertised.  Its no surprise that most of this involves China, and is a major industry there.  And now with AI to create fake web pages this fraud is easier to conduct than ever.  People who complain to their payment mechanism, whether a credit card of PayPal, may well be able to get their money back.  For more detail, see my study on this topic.
 

Fraud Studies: Here are links to the studies I’ve written for the Better Business Bureau: puppy fraud, romance fraud; BEC fraud, sweepstakes/lottery fraud,  tech support fraud, romance fraud money mules, crooked movers, government imposters, online vehicle sale scams, rental fraud, gift cards,  free trial offer frauds,  job scams,  online shopping fraud,  fake check fraud and crypto scams
 
Fraud News Around the worldFTC and CFPBArtificial IntelligenceHumorBEC FraudBenefit TheftScam CompoundsBitcoin and Crypto FraudRansomware and data breachesIRS and tax fraudATM Skimming                                                       Jamaica and Lottery FraudRomance Fraud and Sextortion 
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Press Coverage of French Protests Broadcasts Neoliberal Message That Markets Matter More Than People

  "Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience."

~ Howard Zinn

'Mind blowing' senior public sector salaries and payouts revealed in Senate Estimates

Press Coverage of French Protests Broadcasts Neoliberal Message That Markets Matter More Than People

The media is speaking with almost one voice to enforce the neoliberal order: ordinary citizens must submit to the needs of the investor class.


Speck Reviews Oh’s Does the Corporate Tax Still Distort Organizational Governance?

This week, Sloan Speck (Blue J; Google Scholar, SSRN) reviews a new work by Jason S. Oh (UCLA; SSRN), Does the Corporate Tax Still Distort Organizational Governance?, 22 N.Y.U. J.L. & Bus. 69 (2025) (TaxProf Blog).

Lawyers and economists have long recognized that taxation affects business entities’ governance decisions, and these tax-induced distortions have motivated decades of calls for corporate tax integration. In Does the Corporate Tax Still Distort Organizational Governance?, Jason Oh brings fresh insights to these longstanding debates. Oh observes that publicly traded companies rarely organize as limited liability companies (or other noncorporate state-law forms), even though LLCs’ governance regime allows greater flexibility without changing the entity’s corporate tax classification (through a check-the-box election or under § 7704’s publicly traded partnership rules). As Oh frames the question, “Why are there so few public LLCs?” To explain this puzzle, Oh advances a “homogeneity hypothesis”: “public entities prefer homogeneous interests and therefore gravitate toward governance and taxation regimes that reinforce homogeneity amongst investors.” In a world where public companies have diverse stakeholders, allocating the firm’s residual value—and upside—in a block of small, standardized units just makes life simpler.

Read More


Your Election Interference Fears Were 100% Justified

TMP – This Is Not a Drill … Repeat … NOT a Drill – Drilling Down Into the Details – More Threats From the Trump DOJ – “The Trump administration has launched a full-blown attack on the midterm elections in California. It’s the very thing that everyone has been worrying that Trump would do for more than a year and yet …

 it doesn’t feel like the totality of what’s happening has really sunk in or embedded itself in the national political conversation as we sit here 12 days out from the end of voting. To recap for those just joining us, the Trump administration has used the false pretext of rampant noncitizen voting to:

  • gin up criminal prosecutions nationwide against noncitizens for alleged voting-related crimes, with a special focus on California, where it rolled out a bunch of dubious new charges with high-profile arrests and official press conferences two weeks before the election;
  • sue California to force it to segregate and not count mail-in ballots from alleged noncitizen voters until it undertakes some new, uncertain, and open-ended investigation into whether the voters are citizens;
  • send federal agents door-to-door looking for noncitizen voters in what is at best a fishing expedition and at worst a campaign to terrorize and instill fear in potential voters in minority communities.

All of this happening — and I cannot emphasize it enough — while universal mail-in voting is already underway in California. 

The various ways in which the Trump administration spent the past several months trying to monkey with the midterms — asserting unprecedented federal control over state-run federal elections, attempting to use the Postal Service to throttle mail-in ballot delivery, demanding access to voter rolls and individual voter information; marshaling federal databases in a purported effort to ferret out noncitizen voters; among other things — was merely a prelude to its open attack on the midterms now ongoing in California. The breadth and persistence of those earlier efforts by the administration has probably dulled the senses a bit and made it harder to distinguish what it happening now as a more serious and immediate threat to free and fair elections. 

The other complicating factor is that the fight to fend off the administration’s attack in California stretches from coast to coast, making it harder for reporters to cover it as a single unified story and for the public to grasp the various tendrils. There’s a major civil lawsuit underway in California and two separate important lawsuits in D.C. Plus the myriad criminal cases in California, which won’t be decided until after the election. 

At the same time, federal grand jury subpoenas are still outstanding that demand voter information from California election officials. And amidst all of that the Trump DOJ continues to actively threaten California election officials with prosecution if they don’t capitulate to administration demands…”

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Millionaire ATO boss admits to massive error on credit card bungled ban

'Mind blowing' senior public sector salaries and payouts revealed in Senate Estimates

The high earnings of some senior public sector executives have dominated a number of Senate Estimates hearings this week, with revelations of massive salaries and even payouts and bonuses.

There are now 17 public servants from a single agency, the Future Fund Management Agency, earning more than a million dollars a year, with one being paid $2.2 million (including incentive bonuses) in the last financial year.

There were a mere 11 executives earning more than a million at the Future Fund the previous year, but they’ve now been joined by another six top-earning executives…


Millionaire ATO boss admits to massive error on credit card ban


ATO boss Rob Heferen admits blunder over credit card ban after business backlash

Australia’s tax chief, who is on a salary of nearly $1m, has confessed to ‘jumping to conclusions’ about how the credit card surcharge ban would hurt small businesses.

Australia’s tax chief has admitted to “jumping to conclusions” about how the Albanese government’s bungled credit card surcharge ban would affect small businesses, all while himself collecting a near million-dollar salary from taxpayers.
The Australian Taxation Office announced earlier this month that from December 1 it would no longer accept credit card payments for tax bills, after the Reserve Bank’s decision to ban surcharges.
The move immediately sparked intense backlash from the small businesses sector, and the ATO’s deadline has since been delayed to June 2027.
ATO Commissioner Rob Heferen, appearing before a senate estimates hearing on Wednesday night, testified he had made the call on September 25 after meeting with credit card companies and determining “the price that they could provide was still such that we felt it was difficult to afford”.
The Commissioner had previously told Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino the ATO would be left with two options, “either we continue to accept credit cards, and seek some additional funding for the costs that it would bear, or we’d cease credit cards,” he said.
Australian Taxation Office Commissioner Rob Heferen appears before senate estimates. Picture: Parliament of Australia
Australian Taxation Office Commissioner Rob Heferen appears before senate estimates. Picture: Parliament of Australia
Mr Heferen told the Senate committee “only five per cent of small businesses would be affected” because 256,000 small businesses pay their tax by credit card. 
“Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” he said.
“One of the things we’ve heard is that people use their credit card to manage their cashflow.
“When I heard that, I had jumped to the conclusion that managing cashflow, related to a situation where a person or a business might be struggling … (with) a credit card would be a pretty risky way of finance.”A
Mr Heferen also admitted that if the ATO had had “earlier engagement with affected stakeholders … we may well have been in a different situation” now.
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price queried the Commissioner about his own salary.
“I’m not entirely familiar … I mean, it’s a lot, I get paid a lot. I’m very well remunerated,” he responded, before concluding it’s “over $800,000”. 
The ATO will stop accepting credit card payments in June next year, backflipping on plans to ban card payments as soon as December. Picture: AAP Image/April Fonti
The ATO will stop accepting credit card payments in June next year, backflipping on plans to ban card payments as soon as December. Picture: AAP Image/April Fonti
Senator Price then confirmed the Commissioner’s package currently amounts to $928,980 including superannuation.
The ban on paying tax by card has lumped additional pressures on small businesses who are already struggling to absorb the cost of allowing credit card payments themselves, unable to pass on a fee to customers since the ban came into effect on October 1.
Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA) chair Matthew Addison previously praised the ATO’s decision to extend credit card tax payments into 2027 while looking for a more “sustainable” solution.
“If the cost of accepting credit card payments is significant enough for the ATO to reconsider its approach, the Government must also recognise the costs being imposed on small businesses that accept those same payments from their customers,” he said.
“COSBOA has consistently warned that banning surcharges without first ensuring lower merchant fees are passed through to small businesses simply shifts those costs onto businesses already operating on tight margins.”


ATO ‘jumped to conclusions’ over bungled ban on credit card payments

Tax office boss concedes the ATO should have consulted better on ending credit card tax payments and admits he misread how businesses use them.

Tax Commissioner Rob Heferen says the ATO should have consulted better with business over its ban on credit card payments. 


ATO boss tells senate estimates he ‘jumped to conclusions’ on business credit card payments


 ATO credit card ban: ‘Hindsight’s a wonderful thing’, says tax chief after business cash-flow misjudgement

The tax chief says he jumped to a conclusion about businesses’ card use before recognising the cash-flow benefits for operators not in financial trouble.

Ryan Johnson
THE NIGHTLY

Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino says the government knew in July the ATO was considering ending credit card payments. NewsWire / David Mariuz

Tax boss Rob Heferen has admitted he incorrectly jumped to the wrong conclusion about how businesses use credit-card payments, conceding that “hindsight’s a wonderful thing” over his office’s controversial move to axe them.

Australian Taxation Office commissioner Rob Heferen told Senate estimates on Wednesday that earlier consultation could have helped identify alternatives to withdrawing a payment option he estimated was used by about 250,000 small businesses.

The ATO on October 1 gave businesses just two months to find another way to pay their tax. Business groups warned of cash-flow disruption and accused it of double standards: businesses could no longer pass card-processing fees on to customers, yet the tax office was dropping direct card payments rather than paying those fees itself.

The Government stepped in eight days later, funding a reprieve until June 30, 2027.

Mr Heferen’s evidence exposed a gap in his initial understanding of why businesses used the payment method.

“I had jumped to the conclusion that managing cash flow related to a situation where a person or a business might be struggling,” he said.

He subsequently recognised that businesses not necessarily in financial trouble could use a card’s interest-free period to manage cash flow.

“It’s cashflow and it means breathing space each month,” restaurateur Nahji Chu said, previously reported by The Nightly.

She described a $10,000 tax payment by card as providing a month’s breathing space while more revenue came in.

Mr Heferen said the ATO had proceeded on figures showing only 5 per cent of small businesses used cards to pay tax. Asked how many that represented, he cited 256,000 users, while offering to correct the number if necessary.

He said earlier engagement could have involved businesses in finding a solution, rather than presenting a decision and giving them time to adjust.

“I think we’d be more active in trying to engage with people earlier,” he said.

With the right stakeholders involved, including the small-business ombudsman, “we may well have been in a different situation”.

Business groups had complained about precisely that distinction between shaping the decision and implementing it.

After an October 7 meeting, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Andrew McKellar said: “The ATO is saying they’re not negotiating the decisions made. They’re talking about implementation and how that’s going to happen.”

The agency’s justification centres on the cost of accepting cards without passing processing fees on to users. The ATO estimates continued acceptance would cost $200 million annually with taxpayers footing the bill. 

Mr Heferen said card companies had “engaged very constructively” in negotiations, but their offers remained difficult for the agency to afford.

“The price that they could provide us was still such that we felt it was difficult to to afford,” he said.


Businesses will still be able to pay tax by credit card through third-party providers after June 2027. The ATO has warned taxpayers to consider their fees, charges and processing times.

Its October 9 statement promised further consultation on hardship support and alternatives for taxpayers unable to pay through other methods.

Mr Heferen mentioned payment deferrals and waiving interest on tax debt as measures earlier discussions might have explored, but explicitly stopped short of proposing them.


Reflections on developments in large market taxation (and why Australia is different)

Second Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn's speech at the AmCham Presidio series event.

Introduction

Thank you for having me here tonight, it is wonderful to have the opportunity to speak with an organisation that reflects the important and enduring relationship between Australia and the US, both at a country-to-country level, but also with significant cross border investment and trade between our private sectors.

Tonight I have been asked to reflect on the evolution of large market taxation over the last twenty years (and the last ten years in particular), drawing out some macro themes, and then how that has influenced tax administration in Australia (and given this is AmCham, some occasional comments on the US position!).


ATO boss Rob Heferen admits blunder over credit card ban after business backlash

Australia’s tax chief, who is on a salary of nearly $1m, has confessed to ‘jumping to conclusions’ about how the credit card surcharge ban would hurt small businesses.

The Australian Taxation Office is standing firmly behind its crackdown on decades-old paperwork errors by trust holders, accusing families and small businesses using trusts of being “sloppy” while claiming the obscure tax rules had not yet sent anybody bankrupt.
Under intense scrutiny over its bungled credit card payment ban and a covert raid on trust holders for breaking historic tax rules, senior executives from the ATO defended “deliberately harsh penalties” for Australians found in breach of complex tax regulation from the 1990s.
Accountants earlier this month sounded the alarm on an ATO push to collect penalties from trust holders caught by historic family trust distribution tax rules launched in the past year, suggesting the uptick in debt collection was driven by the ATO’s desire to increase its revenue.
Fronting a Senate estimates hearing, ATO second commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn denied the growth in detected breaches was the result of a change in stance from the tax office, instead claiming that a “sporadic number of matters” had come up as part of ordinary reviews and audits.
ATO second commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn.
ATO second commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn.
The tax office last year released a statement that said it had observed “an increase in FTDT issues” due to inadequate record-keeping and succession planning, intergenerational expansion of businesses and the evolution of private groups.
Despite examples of historic FTDT liabilities of $47,000 ballooning to a bill of $890,000 as a result of compounding general interest charges, Mr Hirschhorn claimed that no trust-holders who had fallen foul of the rules had yet been forced into bankruptcy.
He also defended the significant penalties attached to FTDT breaches, pointing to an amnesty implemented by the tax office, allowing trustholders to self-assess potential breaches and only face 20 per cent of the general interest charge.
However that amnesty period is set to expire the day before the government’s three-year rollover relief window opens, when businesses and families are likely to restructure out of discretionary trusts into company or fixed unit trusts to avoid the minimum 30 per cent tax.
This means those who uncover old errors during this period will be potentially liable for the full general interest charge.
“Those consequences were deliberately set at a harsh level to stop people abusing the family trust election. What has become clear over the last couple of years is that many family groups and their advisers have done things inconsistent with their family, trust elections, and have potentially triggered those harsh consequences,” Mr Hirschhorn said on Wednesday night.
“I would also say in relation to the family trust election, the taxpayers with that problem generally are not the average small business running their operations through a trust and a company.”
Tax consultancy firm RSM Australia has reported a “large number” of their clients running small to medium business being caught by the tax rules, claiming they were being penalised for “administrative and technical errors, in circumstances involving no mischief whatsoever”.
The Housing Industry Association estimates about three in five of its members operate through a family trust.
Daniel Mulino praised the Tax Commissioner’s testimony to a Senate inquiry, in which he conceded the ATO’s consultation on a credit card ban was poorly designed. Picture: Martin Ollman
Daniel Mulino praised the Tax Commissioner’s testimony to a Senate inquiry, in which he conceded the ATO’s consultation on a credit card ban was poorly designed. Picture: Martin Ollman
During Wednesday’s Senate estimates hearing ATO officials also came under significant heat for its bungled credit card payment ban, after the government was forced to step in and extend a consultation with business furious about the changes.
Tax Commissioner Rob Heferen admitted the ATO had “jumped to conclusions” about how businesses used credit cards for tax purposes and should have been more active in its consultation over the ban.
“With the experience we have now, if we had I guess the similar thing happened to us again, I think we would be more active in trying to engage with people earlier,” he told the Senate economics committee.
Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino on Thursday praised Mr Heferen’s testimony as “very thoughtful and forthright”, declaring the tax office was facing a “complex” set of circumstances.
“When it came to the ATO, they were negotiating with credit card companies, trying to get a better deal so that they could figure out what options were possible. It was a complicated environment,” he told Radio National.
“As the commissioner has said in hindsight, in parallel with those discussions with the credit card companies, in parallel with thinking about how long a transition period should have been, they could have beneficially engaged with small business more.”

Thomas Henry
THOMAS HENRYREPORTER
Thomas Henry is a reporter for The Australian's Canberra press gallery bureau. He joined the masthead after graduating from the 2025 cadet program and holds a Bachelor of Economics from Sydney University
 Refunds Redirected to a Trust Account and False ID Record: 'Tax Refund on Spot' Operator Loses Its Tax Agent Registration


Tax agency terminated for serious breaches


The TPB has ended the registration of a tax agent company over client verification failures and offering clients payments if they did not make complaints against the company.

14 October 2026 • By  Malavika Santhebennur  
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The Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) has terminated the registration of Xact Taxation (previously trading as Tax Refund on Spot) after finding serious failures in its client identity verification and record-keeping processes.

The TPB found that the company had breached multiple items of the Code of Professional Conduct and no longer met the requirements for registratio. It has prohibited the company from reapplying for registration for three years.

The TPB’s investigations found that the company had engaged in conduct that breached the code by failing to act honestly and with integrity. The company had done this by:

  • Accessing clients’ ATO notices of assessment without authorisation and falsely representing to the TPB that those documents had been provided by the clients to satisfy proof-of-identity (POI) requirements.
  • Maintaining false interview sheets and POI records to support those representations
  • Falsely claiming that document verification service checks had been undertaken for POI when they had not been completed
  • Implementing terms and conditions that allowed the company to deduct fees from ATO refunds for up to 10 years, even if it did not lodge the income tax return and repeatedly redirect refunds to the company’s trust account.

The investigations also revealed that the company offered “goodwill payments” to clients on the condition that they agree not to make complaints against it.

Furthermore, the TPB found that the company failed to provide tax agent services competently by not carrying out adequate POI checks, maintaining adequate records of identification documents checked for POI purposes, changing clients’ bank account details without properly verifying their circumstances, and failing to implement appropriate supervision and quality assurance processes before lodging tax returns.

The consequence of these failures was that the company failed to take reasonable care to ascertain clients’ circumstances before changing financial institution details on ATO records, and failed to conduct POI according to the requirements. Income tax returns were lodged without client authorisation, and client refunds were redirected.

According to the TPB, this demonstrated a failure to exercise reasonable care and comply with key professional obligations.

In addition to this, the TPB’s investigation showed that the company’s directors were no longer fit and proper persons, and as such, the company failed to meet the tax practitioner registration requirements under the Tax Agent Services Act 2009 (TASA) that its directors must be fit and proper persons.

As director and supervising agent of the company, Mona Makan was found not to be a fit and proper person as she caused the company to engage in conduct that undermines public trust and confidence in the integrity of the tax system and the professional standards expected of the tax practitioners.

As a supervising agent, Presh Batra was found not to be a fit and proper person as he caused the company to engage in conduct that breached the code, and as a registered tax agent, submitted client income tax returns that were unauthorised.

Both Makan and Batra were found to have caused the company to engage in conduct that is so serious that the TPB, the ATO commissioner, clients, and the public could not have confidence that Makan would perform her functions as a registered tax agent to the required standard of integrity and competence.

Given the seriousness of the breaches of conduct, the TPB said it also decided to prohibit the company from reapplying for registration for three years from the date the termination takes effect.

TPB chair Peter de Cure said the decision illustrates the importance of strong client verification and governance processes in protecting taxpayers and maintaining confidence in the tax profession.

“This case involved serious failures in client identity verification, record-keeping and practice governance. These failures enabled tax returns to be lodged without proper authorisation and exposed clients to significant risk,” he said.

“Identity verification is not simply an administrative step. It is a fundamental safeguard that helps protect clients from fraud, unauthorised access to their information and the misuse of their tax affairs. Tax practitioners should review their systems and processes regularly to ensure they have effective controls in place and are meeting their professional obligations.”

de Cure warned that the TPB will take appropriate action against tax practitioners who do not meet standards.

“Tax practitioners play a trusted role in the tax system and are expected to meet high standards of competence, integrity and client care,” he said.

The termination came into effect on 16 July 2027 and ends on 16 July 2029.

On 15 July 2026, Xact Taxation Pty Ltd applied to the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) for a review of the TPB’s decisions to terminate its tax agent registration and prohibit it from reapplying for registration for three years.

The review of the TPB’s decision is yet to be heard.




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