This is a very different article to thsoe I normally write. Instead of many comments, I have got none. Perhaps I should have done an article on Sex and the ATO, or capitalism and the ATO. (I could write one on the latter, actually).

But I think the points are valid, and not just confined to the ATO.

The Rudd Government's "efficiency" dividend is a disaster across the federal bureaucracy.

The lack of strategic thinkers in the public service and elsewhere is a well established fact.

The increase in work hours (destroying work/life balance) among Australian workers is well documented.

I think these are issues worthy of debate.

What exactly were you expecting, Passy?

>>Instead of many comments, I have got none.<<

If I wanted to hear someone whinge about their job, the shortsightedness of their management, the lack of "work/life balance" and the pathetic pay levels, I can walk down to the pub, any day of the week.

Most often, it is timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned public servants who do the moaning. And they all want me to pay for their "increased pay, proper job structuring and clearer prospects and rapid promotion", as if it is some kind of god-given right.

And somehow, they always manage to get to the pub ahead of me.

If you want to understand about low pay, long hours, zero recognition, oppressive regulatory environment and a complete absence of "life/work balance", Passy, try starting and running your own business.

You might even form a different view of the "experience, expertise and wise heads" that you claim exist within the ATO.

So, don't be too surprised that you don't get a reaction here on OLO.

At least at the pub I can get a beer.

Thanks Pericles. I suspect you would think slashing the public service by 50% might be a good idea. No buses, trains, hospitals, schools, tax collectors etc.

Your stereotype of public servants is inaccurate. When I took over one area some staff had leave of over 10 weeks annual leave and weeks of time off in lieu accumulated.

As to work conditions, what about employees in small business? How are they treated? If you as an owner have such bad work conditions, how about staff in SMEs? (That is a question, not a comment.)

Actually this wasn't supposed to be a whinge. It was a letter of love, unrequited no doubt, to the ATO.

I was referring to the tone of your article Passy, as you very well know.

All other inferences - that I would slash the public service, or that I perceive all public servants as stereotypes - are your own.

And my staff are extremely happy, thanks for asking.

Being in such short supply, they get above-average pay and perks, and are generally treated like the gold-dust that they are. Since they will always have the alternative to work in a larger company with greater job security, you really have to make that extra effort.

Of course, it helps when they have such a great boss.

Who doesn't whinge.

Pericles

You argue you don't stereotype public servants but write:

"Most often, it is timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned public servants who do the moaning."

Looks like stereotyping to me. Of course private enterprise is always more efficient - telstra, the banks etc come to mind.

Maybe the problem is alienation under capitalism.

And you also say:

"If I wanted to hear someone whinge about their job, the shortsightedness of their management, the lack of "work/life balance" and the pathetic pay levels, I can walk down to the pub, any day of the week."

Ah, but what eloquent whingeing, quoting Wilde, Mao and reaching Obama like heights in rhetoric. (Or maybe I am just full of myself.)

Then again, my drinking mates are pretty eloquent, witty, charming, and political too. So maybe you are right - maybe the pub is a good place for such discussions. But it shouldn't be the only place for such debate.

Yes you wonder how government departments that were running efficiently could continue to provide the same services if they have to comply with the across the board efficiency cuts of 3.5%.
So now the Tax Office runs ads to scare us into compliance because they don't have the resources to check compliance
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has reduced the size of its population survey making the "unemployment statistics" look even more ridiculous.
Its a pity that you think that public servants who have worked for the government since they are 18 or 21 shouldn't retire at 54 years 11 months. Like people employed in private industry, after a 3 month holiday, they should be able to return to work - if that's what they want. Oops perhaps Pericles wouldn't like his employees to feel cheated by public service conditions being better.

Billie

I am not opposed to Public servants retiring at 54 and 11 months, or resigning, to be more precise.

I am in that category. I am just pointing out that the ATO (and I think many public service organisations) are not prepared or preparing for the loss of expertise exemplified by the 54/11 issue.

In retrospect I should have concetrated on the loss of expertise issue, not the 54/11 example.

You are in wilful misunderstanding mode, Passy.

Or maybe it is that you read too quickly to absorb the meaning. I am generally very careful with words - not always, but most often.

Here, I am going to stand by them fully.

(By the way, were you ever required back in junior school to parse a sentence - you know, identify subject, verb, object and so on? It is a good discipline to learn.)

"Most often, it is timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned public servants who do the moaning."

The subject of the sentence is "public servants". The verb is "do the moaning".

However, the quantum of public servants involved is strictly qualified by the need for each one to match the full set of adjectives: "timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned...".

I made no suggestion as to how many public servants meet these adjectival requirements, or even whether any do. So no stereotyping is involved, simply a determination of "if the cap fits..."

The link with context is made through the adverbial "most often", which not only reflects the pub environment where I find these moaners, but also leaves open the possibility that other barflies there might similarly indulge in said moaning - including, if you are going to be pedantic about it, public servants who fulfil one or more, but not all, of the descriptors listed.

>>Then again, my drinking mates are pretty eloquent, witty, charming, and political too.<<

Mine too.

Especially as the evening wears on, when everyone becomes positively Churchillian, rhetoric-wise.

You couldn't resist the little jab, could you?

>>Of course private enterprise is always more efficient - telstra, the banks etc come to mind.<<

I'm a small business, so I share the general loathing of these organizations.

But the problem is that they are encouraged by mis-directed regulation to operate in conditions of imperfect competition, hence they act more like monopolies or cartels.

Cravenly weak governments, over many decades, have led to this situation. More competition will eventually solve the problem, if any government ever has the courage to deregulate the banking system.

You are in wilful misunderstanding mode, Passy.

Or maybe it is that you read too quickly to absorb the meaning. I am generally very careful with words - not always, but most often.

Here, I am going to stand by them fully.

(By the way, were you ever required back in junior school to parse a sentence - you know, identify subject, verb, object and so on? It is a good discipline to learn.)

"Most often, it is timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned public servants who do the moaning."

The subject of the sentence is "public servants". The verb is "do the moaning".

However, the quantum of public servants involved is strictly qualified by the need for each one to match the full set of adjectives: "timeserving, clockwatching, RDOing, three-months-maternity-leaving, bloated-pensioned...".

I made no suggestion as to how many public servants meet these adjectival requirements, or even whether any do. So no stereotyping is involved, simply a determination of "if the cap fits..."

The link with context is made through the adverbial "most often", which not only reflects the pub environment where I find these moaners, but also leaves open the possibility that other barflies there might similarly indulge in said moaning - including, if you are going to be pedantic about it, public servants who fulfil one or more, but not all, of the descriptors listed.

>>Then again, my drinking mates are pretty eloquent, witty, charming, and political too.<<

Mine too.

Especially as the evening wears on, when everyone becomes positively Churchillian, rhetoric-wise.

You couldn't resist the little jab, could you?

>>Of course private enterprise is always more efficient - telstra, the banks etc come to mind.<<

I'm a small business, so I share the general loathing of these organizations.

But the problem is that they are encouraged by mis-directed regulation to operate in conditions of imperfect competition, hence they act more like monopolies or cartels.

Cravenly weak governments, over many decades, have led to this situation. More competition will eventually solve the problem, if any government ever has the courage to deregulate the banking and telecommunication systems.

Thanks for the grammar lesson, Pericles. Your hair splitting reminds me a bit of Bill Clinton before the Lewinski hearings.

You mention the failure of regulation to prevent monopolisation. In fact monopolisation is inherent in capitalism and is the logical consequence of competition and the drive for more and more profit.

It is interesting that my article has provoked positive comment from former and serving tax officers.

Serving tax officers are too scared to agree with me publicly, given that there could be redundancies flowing throughout the ATO in the near future. It would be interesting to know how many staff have gone since Rudd's 3.25% efficiency dividend came in and how many more reductions are or might be planned, and what the implications are or wil be for tax collection in Australia.

The Commissioner's comments at Senate Estimates in February this year are relevant. He said:

"The Government's current efficiency drive may, in addition to our efforts to further improve our efficiency, necessitate the diversion of resources from other areas to meet the Government's policy agenda in this reagrd..."

I think he was saying the efficiency dividend is a crock but in obfuscatory language only the likes of Pericles could welcome.

Hair-splitting?

>>Thanks for the grammar lesson, Pericles. Your hair splitting reminds me a bit of Bill Clinton before the Lewinski hearings<<

My explanation was only necessary in order to show how you had grasped the wrong end of the stick, Passy. If you are now saying it was not needed, than you must have deliberately chosen to misunderstand me the first time around.

I was in fact giving you the benefit of the doubt. Won't happen again.

>>monopolisation is inherent in capitalism and is the logical consequence of competition and the drive for more and more profit<<

I would have thought that if the twentieth century showed us anything, it was that monopolisation is most evident in state control over the means of production and distribution (communism, to those with short memories).

Far from being "inherent", unrestricted and fair competition will stave off the creation of a monopoly for a very long time. It is only when governments put their own political interests ahead of those of the people, that capitalist monopolies are able to come into existence.

And quite how you got the idea that I am in favour of "obfuscatory language" boggles the imagination...

>>I think he was saying the efficiency dividend is a crock but in obfuscatory language only the likes of Pericles could welcome.<<

Even more interesting is that I managed to get a completely different impression from the quoted text.

"The Government's current efficiency drive may, in addition to our efforts to further improve our efficiency, necessitate the diversion of resources from other areas to meet the Government's policy agenda in this reagrd..."

To me, this is a straightforward threat.

If you insist on this, it seems to be saying, we are going to divert so much resources to the effort - as only public servants can - that instead of becoming more efficient, we will bring government services to a standstill.

Am I misunderstanding this Passy? Perhaps you can parse the sentence for me, to make it clearer.

Sorry Pericles, I was annoyed with what appeared to be your attempt to justify your slur on public servants by saying you weren't slurring them. I will try to be more temperate in future.

I think you and I agree about what the Commissioner is saying.

I think the trend in capitalism to monopoly reached its apogee in the merging of state and capital in the Stalinist countries (what you call communism but what I call Stalinism, the gravedigger of socialism). Similar statist trends are evident in Western countries after the war.

I will have a hunt around for some figures on monopoly to show the trend continues and appears inexorable. Increased mergers and acquisitions over time are one example of this. For example BHP merged with Billiton and now wants to merge with Rio Tinto.

I think the main point is valid - monopoly is the logical outcome of competition. No amount of tinkering can change that.

I think this reflects itself in tax administration. The ATO has interest in mergers and acquisitions since many of them will involve tax preferred outcomes, some of which may be avoidance. In addition because this is often the big end of town the amounts involved are massive, (in some cases enough to destroy Budget predictions of surplus etc) and they are often multi-jurisdictional.

The task for the ATO is to anticipate these changes and others and be prepared for them, to battle those who see Australia as a convenient staging post for tax effective transactions and to protect the revenue as a consequence. This is no small task and one unarticulated point of my article was to ask how prepared and ready the ATO is to address the forces of global capitalism as they continue to restructure? This is but one part of the wider question for us as individuals and societies in the face of constant and ongoing globalisation.

My tentative conclusion was that the ATO has some preparedness, but maybe not as much as it thinks.

TBC.

Do you know what would really help, Passy?

Simplification of our tax laws.

This would ease the workload on small business, whose biggest concern is to be caught unawares by an ambiguous clause (or a pair of conflicting clauses) that could jeopardise their existence.

It would ease the workload of the ATO, who would need to spend less time on justification of arcane, unrealistic and contradictory areas of the Act, and more on hunting down malefactors.

It would also make less work for lawyers, which is probably one of the most significant inhibitors to change. Lawyers don't complain about the complexity and sheer volume of tax legislation, because they get $500 an hour to work their way through it.

It would - if properly thought through and meticulously drafted - reduce avoidance.

However, I suspect this would not be a particularly great outcome for employees of the ATO. They would need lower levels of skill for the bulk of the work, and experience would no longer be at a premium except in some areas of fraud detection.

Such is the cost of addressing a problem at its source, rather than merely its symptoms.

But it would at least provide a genuine "efficiency dividend"

Continued:

We hear a lot about Wickenby, and the ongoing investigations and the successful prosecution and jailing of a high profile individual. My question is, in light of the trouble this investigation has had in getting more than one prosecution in 3 or 4 years, and the seeming luck in grabbing the portable PC of one of the major architects of some schemes, how many more Wickenbys are there we as a society don't know about? (Or am I being Rumsfeldian?)

To use an analogy, you can find gold by dropping someone in the middle of nowhere and letting them stumble around for years, or you can do all the various geological studies and go to where you think, based on scientific analysis, there is a greater likelihood of finding it.

Is Wickenby an example of the former stumble in the desert approach or the latter scientific evidence approach?

The recent Liechtenstein discovery doesn't inspire much confidence either. A disgruntled employee sells details of a Liechtenstein bank's information to German and other tax authorities. Australia has exchange of information clauses in treaties with those other authorities.

This is reactive, not proactive. I would have hoped the ability of the ATO and its fraternal agencies around the world would be such that they prevent these apparently widespread abuses.

I am not trying to gainsay the ATO. The staff there work their guts out. Perhaps it is Sisyphus. Perhaps it is, as Marx said, tragedy followed by farce. But I do think something needs to change.

Pericles, you mention tax simplification. In a draft article I have written I mention this. Essentially the development of the tax value method (cash flows plus changes in the tax value of assets) would have simplified our system. The ATO supported this simplification, which would have created simplicity, certainty and the scope for ongoing change for them and for society. Big business and tax advisers opposed it and turned Costello from a supporter to someone who abandonnd it

Pericles is right.The whole system just ties itself in knots particularly with the legal disease."The process is more important than the outcomes."A friend who worked for 30 yrs in private enterprise at a corporate level did a stint of 7 yrs with the NSW Public Service and the quote above back in 2001,was his.

Nothing will change unless we have serious reform and rationalisation of all our PS.We have to stop the process of empire building and bring in a survival component as exists in private enterprise.

The less tax we give them,the better off are hard working people.