Tax watchdog records drop in complaints, but 65 agents still deregistered

Almost 1300 complaints and referrals were assessed by the Tax Practitioners Board during the 2021-22 financial year, with 143 of these cases making it through to a conduct committee for further consideration.

The TPB registers, investigates and disciplines tax practitioners. Its annual report, released in the past week, says most practitioners do “great work”.

It does, however, receive complaints from a range of sources including the public, registered tax practitioners and the Australian Taxation Office.

The TPB received 1296 complaints in 2021-22 — a drop from the 2014 complaints received the previous year.

Members of the public raised 766 complaints while the ATO alerted the TPB to 587 instances of concern.

The tax agent’s regulator uses targeted investigations and litigation to deal with what they describe as high-risk cases but others are dealt with by the TPB’s conduct committee.

That committee can decide on a range of disciplinary sanctions. During the 2021-22 financial year, it terminated the registrations of 65 agents and suspended 15 registered agents.

“We have performed a manual analysis of the wider revenue effect of our compliance work, principally looking at improved compliance demonstrated by clients of practitioners in cases where we directly engaged with the practitioners through compliance work. We are working to automate this analysis in future,” the TPB report says.

The regulator’s report also says surveys demonstrate there is a high usage of tax practitioners.

“According to the most recent wave of the survey, conducted in April 2022, 91% of consumers use a tax practitioner at least once a year. Loyalty to tax practitioners continues to be strong, with 61% of consumers surveyed reporting that they have used the same tax practitioner for more than five years,” the report says.

“Trust between consumer and tax practitioner remains very high, with 89% of consumers surveyed stating that they have trust in their relationship with their tax practitioner.

“Across all consumer groups surveyed, 66% of consumers rated their experience with a tax practitioner as excellent.”

This article was first published by The Mandarin.