The Online Tax Service for The Australian Tax Office

Introduction

All individuals and companied registered in Australia have a duty towards the government to pay taxes. These taxes which are collected help to account for the implementation and maintenance of the public services. As such, it is important that all the residents pay their share of the taxes to avoid lack of funds for the public services. In Australia the income tax is collected by the Australian Taxation Office. All individuals are required to file tax return is they wish to recover the tax amounts based on the tax slabs for which they qualify. Prior to 2013, the tax return was done in papers and individuals paid for the service provided by the tax consultants. But since 2013, the lodgement of tax return have been made online to ease up the process for the users.

Online Tax Services in Other Countries

Many countries other than Australia have also adopted online tax return process. In the United States, individuals and businesses lodge tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The tax returns forms are recommended by the IRS department or other relevant authority. Individuals and businesses can collect the forms and use tax preparation software like TurboTax, TaxSlayer to prepare their tax statements. The industry in the United States is influenced by the lobby of tax preparation companies and hence, there has been little or no progress on the self-preparation of the tax (Mills 1998). Most of the countries of the European Union have a database “Taxes in Europe”.

In the system, description of about 650 taxes all over Europe can be found. These descriptions have been gained from the Ministries of Finance of the different members. The database contains, for every individual duty, data on its lawful premise, appraisal base, principle exceptions, material rate(s), financial and factual grouping, and also the income produced by it. The database is not intended to constitute a reference for lawful purposes. Various taxes like the revenue taxes (income taxes, corporate taxes, EU fit extract obligations) (Klun 2009).In the case of India, online services are provided by the Government to lodge tax return, filling application for ID documents – passport, PAN card etc. Moreover, there are facilities provided online to estimate the value of tax and file tax return.

There are also facilitation centres located to provide assistance to those in need (Verma, Mishra & Thangamuthu 2006). The Income Tax Department is represented by the Central Board for Direct Taxes (CBDT) - The E-Filing office was presented by the Income Tax Department interestingly amid appraisal year 2006-07. At exhibit, it is compulsory for organizations and firms requiring statutory review under Section 44AB to e-record their Income Tax Returns. Additionally, the e-recording advantage has been reached out to all evaluates.

Technical Implementation

The Australian Taxation Office has changed its heritage online tool – eTax has been resigned, and supplanted with another electronic framework – myTax in 2016 that enables residents to file the tax return in relatively short period of time. The new tool- myTax has been extended to do everything e-Tax could do with some added functionalities. Most Australians with investment properties have the capacity to utilize myTax, yet they will likewise have the capacity to exploit the completely incorporated apparatuses and adding machines. One of these new instruments enables property financial specialists to record devaluation and capital recompenses.The federal government of Australia have mandated the use of AUSkey for the tax professionals to access the Tax Agent Portal. BAS Agent Portal, Business Portal and Australian Business Register (ABR).

However, since the implementation of online service of ATO, it has been noted that the AUSkey is inconsistent with browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. As a result, some ‘program extension’ has to be used by the computer systems users to get access to the required portal. Efforts are still ongoing to make the AUSkey add-on compatible with the chrome and Firefox browsers. Presently, users are able to download the link from the ATO help links to use AUSkey with their browsers (Lim & Perrin 2014). After the introduction of the online services, many issues have been reported by the users of the system when trying to access the specified services.

One of the critical issue reported has been the inability of the users to view or edit the account statements. The reason identified for this occurrence is that after some changes in the ATO configurations, the settings of the browsers used by the individuals do not allow the users to view the statements. The resolution of the issue has been found to be the use of updated version of the browsers and also the updated versions of the Operating Systems. Another point of contention is the updating of the AUSkey link. For members of the ATO who use Internet Explorer v11.0 there is an added complexity of removing the site from the compatibility setting of the browser. This can be done easily by opening the compatibility view of the Internet Explorer and removing domain name ato.gov.au from the list of the sites present (Anderson 2000).