Australian Tax Office pays to fire, pays to hire

The ATO is looking to catch more big-time tax cheats by hiring new specialist public servants, just months after paying more than 400 of them tens of millions of dollars to leave.

The Tax Office is advertising technical specialist jobs at APS 6, EL1 and EL2 pay levels in two of its units: Public Groups & International and Private Groups and High Wealth Individuals.

The job ads have appeared after hundreds of experienced and trained technical staff from the two outfits were declared redundant in the past year, many walking out with golden handshakes worth a year’s salary.

The Tax Office culled more than 1100 of its compliance officials in just 11 months, even as it endured a torrent of criticism over corporate and multinational tax avoidance.

The latest figures from the Tax Office confirms that more than half of the 2149 redundancies in the ATO in 2014-2015 came from the “compliance” business line, with the pivotal Private Groups and High Wealth Individuals section losing nearly 20 per cent of its workforce.

The unit responsible for seeing that large Australian companies and multinationals doing business here pay their taxes, Public Groups and International, is also looking to hire.

But PGI got rid of 187 public servants between July 2014 and April 2015, 166 of them between the APS 6 and EL2 classifications.

Private Groups and High Wealth individuals handed redundancy cheques to 270 of its staffers in the same period, 245 of them in the classifications that the ATO is now looking to hire.

The ATO says it is “rebalancing” its workforce with “targeted recruitment” but would not say if any of the retrenched workers would be allowed to apply for the new jobs.

But former ATO compliance officer Martin Lock said the job ads followed a period where the ATO came under concerted political pressure to lift its game on tax compliance.

“The job advertisements follow soon after alarming evidence was presented at the Senate Inquiry into Corporate Tax Avoidance that dozens of multinationals in Australia, both foreign and locally headquartered, have for years been shifting billions of dollars in profits out of Australia to related entities offshore to avoid Australian tax,” Mr Lock said.

“Investigations run by Fairfax Media, before and over the course of the Inquiry, have revealed entrenched large-scale tax avoidance activity among some of Australia’s biggest and most prominent corporations in the multi-media, digital technology, energy and mining, pharmaceutical and banking and finance industries, including avoidance carried out while the ATO’s 3000-plus redundancy program was in full swing.”

“The newly advertised technical positions come despite the Commissioner telling Parliament last year and the Senate Inquiry this year that the massive reduction in technical staff numbers resulting from the 2014 redundancy program , including from its International tax division, would not impair the ATO’s ability to do its compliance and international work.”

“Only this week, the Commissioner again told the Inquiry he had sufficient resources to tackle multinational tax avoidance.”

An ATO spokeswoman said the office was looking for the “right mix” of workers and that the jobs that were being advertised were “critical”.

“The ATO is reshaping and rebalancing our workforce to achieve the right mix of capabilities and organisational structures in place to deliver our services to the community,” she said.

“The ATO will only undertake considered and purposeful recruitment targeted at specialist skills or expertise, and/or to account for some natural attrition.

“The current advertised positions have been identified as being critical to the successful delivery of our business outcomes.

“We will be recruiting a small number of specialists with experience in analyzing trusts, transfer pricing and contemporary international business practices.”