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ATO commissioner Chris Jordan is predicting record lodgement numbers for tax time 2017, as the number of taxpayers lodging their own returns catches up to tax agent lodgement numbers.
Commissioner tips ‘record-breaking year’ for lodgements
17 August 2017
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6 minute read
As of yesterday, the ATO said it has received just shy of five million returns, which is up 360,000 compared to this time last year.
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About three million of these lodgements came from tax agents, which is up by about 2 per cent from 2016. By comparison, about two million taxpayers used myTax to lodge, which is up 13 per cent from 2016.
Mr Jordan also boasted about myTax’s satisfaction rating with taxpayers and its turnaround time.
“We’re finding that people who lodge their own return through myTax are finished in less than half an hour. It’s one of the reasons why we have a 93 per cent satisfaction rate with users,” he said.
The growth of the myTax system is in line with its growth since its rollout in 2015.
The service is more stable than it was at the outset, when it was plagued with unexpected downtime, leaving the ATO to request that taxpayers hold off on their lodgements until August.
Scepticism about the self-serve offering has remained strong in the accounting industry in the years since. In fact, late last year, a sample study conducted by H&R Block found errors in returns submitted which favour the ATO.
“Those findings were supported by other recent research which highlighted that whilst over 90 per cent of self-lodgers were confident that they had completed their myTax returns correctly, over 50 per cent of the same group was unable to accurately identify the correct treatment of common deduction items,” said director of tax communications at the national network, Mark Chapman, at the time.
So far this year, the ATO has issued 3.6 million refunds, worth about $8.5 billion. Most of these were turned around during the 12-day service standard.
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