A Known Glitch in the Matrix and an Update to our Lodgement Extension Request - 25th July 2022

1. A Known Glitch in the Matrix

Two of our administration staff sat through a webinar last week run by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) where the ATO outlined a problem they have been having lately with issuing certain correspondence.

It turns out any taxpayer who ENTERS the PAYG (Pay as You Go) Instalment system for the first time AND the ATO sets the communication preference for them as Electronic, is NOT going to receive their PAYG Instalment notice at all, for the current quarter and future quarters.

A PAYG Instalment Notice is also known as an Instalment Activity Statement (IAS) and that's what we call them. The problem is a known glitch in the matrix. The ATO have known about this issue for a while now and they are working toward a fix.

Taxpayer who are already IN the matrix will still get their IAS's. Taxpayers who have their communication preference set as Paper will still have their paper IAS sent to them and many taxpayers will still get their IAS's sent directly to their MyGov accounts.

The problem is isolated to just the new entrants to the PAYG system. It is an issue that has been driving us crazy for ages. Each quarter for the past couple of years, some clients would contact our office when they received a final notice from the ATO but they didn't receive the original IAS.

This would send us on a chase to find out where the original notice was sent. We could not for life of us work out the pattern when some clients had their IAS sent out and some did not. This now solves the mystery.

Until the ATO fixes this glitch, our hard working administration staff will download a report from the ATO each quarter to identify all the new entrants to the PAYG I system. We will then download the IAS and send it to you by email. We have gone back the March 2022 quarter to make sure we capture as many 'lost' IAS's as possible. Many thanks for your patience with this issue.

2. An Update to our Lodgement Extension Request - June 2021 income tax returns

You may recall our ongoing saga with the ATO where in early May 2022, we asked for an extension of time to lodge our clients' income tax returns for the year ended 30 June 2021 to this Friday 29 July 2022. The ATO took over two months to respond and on 11 July 2022 they partially allowed our request. Whilst we were able to get the lodgement extension date to 29 July 2022, the ATO, in their infinite wisdom decided that the due date for any client of ours that had tax payable, was still the original due date of 06 June 2022.

As you can imagine, we were not happy with that response and objected strongly to their decision. To the ATO's credit they came back to us last Friday and have now granted us a lodgement and payable deadline of Wednesday 31 August 2022. This is more than we wanted and we'll take it.