ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
The Australian Tax Office has warned struggling small business owners that they are in their sights today as the financial year ends with a bang.
Interest rates are set to be jacked again today by the Reserve Bank, compounding pressure on families and people just out there having a go.
If you tell the ATO boss that, he’ll tell you he doesn’t care.
“You can ask us to clamp down on giant multinationals that get IP invoices from places like Dublin, Panama or even the Cayman Islands around this time of year but as we keep saying, they’ll just go somewhere else and do it and we’ll lose a bunch of jobs,” they said.
“It’s much easier – and much cheaper to go after Australian businesses because they can’t hide. We can audit them, put them on a payment deal and keep their little prunes in our purse until their left ventricle blows out when they’re 77 and still on the tools,”
“A little bit of tax fraud is always welcome. It’s part of our national psyche. I get that. But you can’t take the piss out of the ATO because as I just said, you will have to put your dick on the anvil and I’ll have to go clang with my audit hammer. You don’t want that. So don’t take the piss out of us. Funny, acceptable tax fraud is a plumber claiming stationary or something, which is funny because we here at the ATO don’t believe that most plumbers can even read,”
“So consider yourself on notice.”
More to come.
