The taxman v the accountant: ‘disgraceful’ conduct and an epic Australian defamation case
Sydney accountant Vanda Gould, only last week sentenced to three years in prison, is suing tax commissioner Chris Jordan
Among Australia’s moneyed elites, it is one of the most eagerly awaited defamation cases for years, a showdown that involves a range of allegations, from offshore cash being used to buy multi-million-dollar houses to possible insider trading, money laundering and rorting of the legal system.
These are just some of the many extraordinary allegations that Australia’s tax commissioner, Chris Jordan, has made in defending himself against a suit brought by one of his most stalwart opponents, Sydney accountant Vanda Gould.
—-A man has been fined a whopping $640,000 and sentenced to more than seven months’ jail, after the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) found out he was lodging dodgy tax returns.
Brisbane man, Kent Scott Hacker, was fined for multiple breaches of the Tax Agent Services Act, after an ATO investigation revealed he was providing unregistered tax agent services.
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We expose more APIs than any other revenue agency in the world and, according to my maths, more than the rest of the world’s agencies combined,” said John Dardo, deputy commissioner and chief digital officer at the ATO, at the Accounting Technology Showcase Australia conference in October.
“Everyone else is looking at us and saying, ‘Holy macaroni, how did you get there?’”
This is an astonishing claim. The UK government has made a lot of noise about its Making Tax Digital initiative. Part of which will require all businesses to use online accounting software to lodge their tax returns. However, the UK is sitting at 175 API connections while the ATO is closer to 230 and will soon reach more than 350 once it adds some off-the-shelf packages, Dardo told me after his speech.
Dardo, a 20-year veteran at the ATO, took up the role seven months ago – after the big crash in December, he pointedly told the audience. He previously ran the ATO’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) project for a year and a half. SBR is the common data framework which will allow government departments to pre-fill online forms with basic contact details through to social security and payroll data.
The battered ATO is actually breaking digital records By Sholto Macpherson
Four years ago no one would know if we had an outage: ATO
Following a string of IT issues plaguing the ATO, its chief digital officer has said future-proofing its infrastructure for a software-driven future is a priority.
Over the past seven months, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has suffered a handful of IT-related incidents, from "one of a kind" SAN outages to mainframe reboots. However, according to John Dardo, chief digital officer for the ATO, the government department is focused on the challenge of making a system that is "more connected and bulletproof than ever before".
"Four years ago when we had an outage event or a slight decline in service, nobody noticed," Dardo told the Technology in Government conference in Canberra on Tuesday.
Dardo said the ATO is moving towards a fully digitised environment, but only where practical
