Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Tax Agent Services (Transitional Provisions and Consequential Amendments) Bill 2009 follows on from the substantive bill that passed through in March of this year. That bill, the Tax Agent Services Bill, introduced national regulation for all tax practitioners. It was a bill that had the full support of the coalition. The new tax agent services regime will mean that for the first time there will be a single national regime governing the registration and regulation of tax practitioners.

This second bill before us today contains a number of consequential amendments contained in a couple of schedules. The first schedule includes the safe harbour provisions that protect taxpayers from administrative penalties that otherwise would arise from certain shortfalls or late lodgements. It also provides protection to taxpayers who provide their tax agents with all required information but their tax agent then fails to take reasonable care by making a false or misleading statement or by failing to lodge a return. This will provide certainty and confidence for all of those taxpayers who use a tax agent to manage their affairs. The schedule also amends existing law to reflect the changes to definitions and to include references to the new tax agent services regime. All of these changes ensure that the tax agent services regime will operate correctly with existing tax legislation.

The second schedule provides for the transition from the current state based registration system to the new national system. It includes provisions to ensure that those tax agents who are currently providing tax agent services will be granted registration through that transitional period, which is a three-year period, and also includes certain entities that are not currently required to be registered. It also includes provisions to register those specialist tax advisers, such as those who provide tax advice in the research and development area, regardless of their ability to meet the registration requirements. Schedule 2 also includes provisions to transfer all the responsibilities and roles of those existing boards at the state level to the new national Tax Agents Board. The schedule will ensure that the new board will be able to adopt all of the functions of those existing boards at the state level across Australia and also ensure that the roles that those boards are playing at the moment in legal proceedings and inquiries will be continued by the new national board.

In conclusion, this bill does not itself include the requirements that tax agents must meet for registration or the requirements for associations to be recognised as professional associations, or a definition of such professional associations, because, we are told, these will be included in regulations sometime in the future—in the not too distant future, we hope and we are told. Those regulations will include requirements for registration, definition of professional associations, fees for registration application, allowances for appearing before the board, obligations of the commissioner and the like. We note that Treasury undertook public consultation on the draft regulations in August.

The tax agents regime itself, of course, has undergone a very long process of consultation and development dating back more than 10 years. The coalition former government consulted very heavily in this area. The government have too, and we encourage them to continue to do that. It is a technical area but something, when this regime comes into play, that will be very much welcomed and is very much in the interests of all Australian taxpayers and tax agents.

The intent of this reform has always been to require those who provide a tax or BAS service for a fee to be registered. It has also always been its intent that those who manage their own tax affairs in their own business will not be subject to the requirements. Those intentions were reflected in the draft material that the coalition former government worked on in the consultations that occurred over those years, and we obviously take it in good faith that the current government intends to maintain the original intention that the tax agent services regime would cover those who provide their service for a fee.

There is obviously some concern about the scope of the regulations, and I would encourage the government to table those regulations soon and to continue their consultation on those matters to provide certainty and finality to what, I say in conclusion and in a bipartisan way, has been a very long but necessary and important reform that will be a step forward in tax administration.

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