Deputy Commissioner Tim Dyce said the ATO has made a number of changes to our advice and guidance services that are designed to be responsive to community needs. Through the review of private advice we set out to learn all we could about our private advice services – and then went about making changes to improve them. The review of private advice has resulted in a series of small changes that have big improvements. See generally: Reshaping private advice.
Our new approach is to engage with you early and provide you with timely advice in a format you can use. We want to make it easy to get things right and harder to get them wrong.
The changes they’ve made so far are:
- to extend their early engagement for advice service so that what was already on offer to big businesses is now available to all sized businesses and individuals; and
- they’ve introduced a streamlined private ruling application form to help you propose your own rulings in a format that would help our technical experts get straight down to interpreting the detail of the matter.
We are committed to improving our private advice processes and providing certainty through tailored, timely advice. We will continue to look at our processes; tweaking and improving where we can, developing tools and services to help you comply.
[ATO – Improving Private Advice; LTN 110, 14/6/17; FJM]