Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

You were enjoying the silence, were you? There is another group of people who gets caught up in these schemes. A most recent case involves the exploitation of employee benefits arrangements. Yesterday, in an article on news.com.au, Katharine Murphy and Elizabeth Colman wrote:

The Inspector-General of Taxation has urged the tax office to offer a more generous settlement to people caught in a bitter dispute over minimisation schemes.

The intervention by David Vos yesterday followed confirmation the ATO will offer 400 taxpayers caught in the schemes—known as employee benefit trusts—a new settlement deal, waiving their fringe benefit tax debts.

Mr Vos negotiated this agreement. A little piece at the bottom of that article says:

The ATO’s handling of the dispute came under attack, with several Coalition backbenchers, led by West Australian Liberal MP Don Randall, criticising former tax commissioner Michael Carmody’s handling of the issue.

It is good to see that someone has realised that a few of us have been pursuing this issue for some time. This would not have been achieved, as I have said to the House previously, unless the former Assistant Treasurer, Mal Brough, had decided that he would take a hand and that people who were having trouble settling with the Australian Taxation Office would be offered settlements. It was taking so long to get any communication from the Australian Taxation Office that these debts blew out. For example, I was visited by some people from the electorate of the member for Swan who had a $40,000 primary tax bill. They own a tank company in Canning Vale and they had a bill of over $1 million because of penalties, interest, primary tax, fringe benefits et cetera. They just could not pay the $1 million. Obviously, they were trading whilst insolvent, and the grief that this was causing these two businesspeople was just unbelievable.

I congratulate the minister, because he brought in the Australian Taxation Office, sat the businesspeople down with their advisers and had a look at the bill they faced. They ended up having only one taxing point and not three, the penalties coming down from 50 per cent to five per cent and the interest coming down from, I think, 13 per cent to 4.7 per cent. That is quite reasonable. Their bill came down from about $1 million to about $100,000, which they could pay, particularly when they were given some consideration and time to pay. That was a really good outcome, and that is what should have happened.

This is one of my great concerns. I say to the people—if there is anyone out there listening to this debate—that the Public Accounts Committee of this parliament is holding an inquiry, led by its chairman Tony Smith, into the administration of the Australian Taxation Office. I encourage all people in Australia who have ever had a problem with the Australian Taxation Office and its administration to make a submission to that inquiry. If they do not make a submission, everybody will think everything is fine. As a result, they will end up being treated much the same by the current Commissioner of Taxation, Mr D’Ascenzo, for whom I do not have a great deal of respect because he is just a clone of Michael Carmody—but that is another issue.

See this speech in context