ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle has suffered six years of pain after lifting lid on garnishees
It’s six years since Richard Boyle went public with practices at the ATO that troubled him, for which most would dub him a hero. So why’s he still being dragged through the courts?
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Richard Boyle was for a time too traumatised to get out of bed.
The Edwardstown unit he shared with his wife was raided by federal police and he faces criminal charges that could lead to decades in jail.
This is whistleblowing, Australian style, where truth tellers are supported in theory but punished in practice with prosecutions for ancillary offences relating to how evidence was gathered.
In the aftermath of being sacked from a job he loved and prosecuted by his former employer, the Australian Taxation Office, Richard Boyle, was struggling to go on.
His wife, Louise Beaston, would panic if she couldn’t reach him during the day, fearing what she might come home to.
“You would never want to put your worst enemy through what we’ve been through,” says Beaston, a freelance violinist who performs with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.
“Richard knew we would be raided and he would wake up at night, peering out of the windows.”
Boyle, who studied pure mathematics at the University of Adelaide, was a debt collector in the Adelaide office of the ATO when in 2017 his life began to unravel.
Boyle, who cannot speak to SA Weekend because of legal action, was disturbed by the heavy-handed use of last-resort debt seizure methods called standard garnishees by which the ATO can empty the accounts of anyone owing them money.
Fearing the damage the overuse of draconian measures could cause – namely bankrupt businesses and possible suicides – Boyle complained internally.
After his complaint was rejected, he went public in early 2018.
Part of Boyle’s evidence of a culture of overuse was an email sent around to staff by an ATO team leader in Adelaide late one Saturday in May 2017.
It read: “The last ‘hour of power’ is upon us … That means you still have time to issue another five garnishees … Right?” Followed by a smiley face.
When the email became part of an investigation by the Inspector-General of Taxation, it was categorised as having been sent “in jest”.
Nevertheless, Boyle’s concerns were vindicated with a finding there were anomalies in the Adelaide office for a period of time in relation to the garnishee practice. As a result of Boyle’s actions, the use of garnishees was tightened.
Unlike the scandalous use of Robodebt which persisted for more than five years, a problem was fixed because Boyle went public.
Yet five years on, his life is at a standstill and he is being hauled through the courts with no end in sight under a government committed to, in the words of Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, “the protection of genuine whistleblowers”.
The problem is the Public Interest Disclosure Act does not cover charges relating to the way evidence is collected and because of this, in March, Boyle was denied whistleblower immunity.
He appealed and is awaiting a decision. If unsuccessful, he will stand trial on 24 charges, including covertly recording conversations and using his phone to photograph documents.
Former South Australia Senator Rex Patrick, who heads the independent Whistleblower Justice Fund, says Boyle’s prosecution can be likened to someone who jaywalks in order to save a child from a danger.
“I save the kid, and the police come along and say ‘we are charging you for jaywalking’,” says Patrick.
“Most people would say that is a disproportionate response to the outcome.”
Boyle, 47, and Beaston, 42, are livingin limbo for doing what Boyle thought was not just right, but was his duty.
They are married but instead of raising children, they are under permanent psychological and financial stress and rely on her salary as a violinist while the federal action grinds through the courts.
Apart from performing with the ASO, Beaston teaches violin at Wilderness School and St Peter’s College and plays in the professional four-string quartet Amicus Strings.
They do not own their own home and Beaston cannot let herself think too much about the children they were planning to have.
“We can’t move on,” she says. “We don’t have any finances.”
Beaston says her husband still can’t work although she is less fearful now that he could end his life.
“Richard’s health is slowly recovering from what it was,” she says.
“But it’s basically been me supporting both of us for the past five or six years, since he blew the whistle.”
Despite what they have gone through, including a federal police raid, Beaston has always supported him for taking the high road.
“We’ve been together for quite a few years and I said ‘I know you, and I know you can’t leave this when you know what’s going on’,” she says.
“He just isn’t the sort of person to sweep something under the carpet.”
She says Richard would tell her how he would talk to people with tax debts and find their lives had gone off the rails.
In one case, a debtor’s four-year-old daughter had brain cancer and he set up a repayment plan so the ATO would be refunded without causing further harm.
He supported the use of garnishee notices in extreme cases but feared the result of imposing a further burden on people who were in personal distress.
“He was worried when they were told to ramp up the use of standard garnishees that someone would kill themselves. It was like Robodebt in the way it was managed,” Beaston says.
Dirk Fielding, who has a publishing business in Melbourne, says Boyle’s intervention saved his life.
Fielding fell behind in his tax after suffering a brain aneurysm and spending four weeks in intensive care followed by months of rehabilitation.
“I don’t want sympathy, I’m lucky to be alive,” Fielding says.
While he was sick and his wife was running the company, an employee defrauded them but Fielding, who remembers little of that time, was incapable of dealing with the financial side.
The ATO then garnished his business account, taking everything from it.
If the garnishee continued, stripping money out of the account as it came in, his business would have been ruined.
In despair, he tried communicating with the ATO which was prohibitively difficult. The ATO does not accept emails and he was told to send a fax.
“I received no response to the first fax,” he says.
“I sent a second fax. Yes, I begged for help. I have never denied owing the tax, but this would have ruined our business and I was the sole income earner for the family.”
There it rested until one Saturday afternoon he took a phone call from Richard Boyle who had in front of him all of Fielding’s details, including the medical discharge documents he had sent through.
“He was amazing and he fully understood the position I was in,” Fielding says.
“He said he would lift the garnishee on Monday, refund the fines, and put in place a repayment schedule, which he did.”
Everything was going to plan when in early 2018, Fielding took a call from the ABC’s Four Corners who had come across Fielding’s name in relation to Boyle’s planned expose.
Alarmed, he rang the ATO to speak to Boyle but by then Boyle had been sacked, or was about to be.
When another ATO officer took the call, Fielding said the ABC had been in touch and he wanted to ask Boyle what was going on.
“Then, basically, all hell broke loose,” says Fielding.
He had inadvertently tipped off the ATO that bad publicity was heading their way.
In response, Beaston says Boyle, who had been marched out of the office and was on leave, was offered a retrenchment package of $30,000 – if he dropped plans to go public.
The couple took a week to decide, in their words, to take the hard path and bring the issue to light.
Beaston says the offer of a package felt like “gag money” and it seemed wrong to accept.
“If they believed he had committed a crime then charge him – but don’t offer him a payout,” Beaston says.
“The expectation was that Richard would quietly delete the taxpayer information from his phone and they would go their separate ways. It felt to us like a bribe.”
When they turned down the offer, the ATO brought in the Australian Federal Police and Boyle was prosecuted.
Fielding, who feels indebted to Boylefor stepping in, feels terrible about what happened.
“I want to apologise to him because I feel this is my fault,” Fielding says.
“Richard stepped up in my time of need and did the right thing – not only by me but by the ATO. It’s a sad society when whistleblowers face decades in jail and there are no victims.”
Beaston says Boyle did the right thing by lodging a Public Interest Disclosure notice internally but it was managed incorrectly and rejected in a process Rex Patrick describes as “botched”.
While in the Senate, Patrick instigated an inquiry into how Boyle’s PID was managed, because he was concerned over the way Boyle was being treated.
“The Senate found that the processing of his PID was superficial, it wasn’t done properly,” he says. “That was a bipartisan position.”
Boyle had followed up by lodging a complaint with the Inspector-General of Taxation but heard nothing for six months, until after the ABC program aired.
The investigation that followed concluded there was a problem for a time with the use of garnishees in the Adelaide office.
“The ATO has reformed because of what Richard did and the practice was stopped and yet they are still persecuting him,” Beaston says.
“He did what he thought was right, and this is what happens.”
Patrick says whistleblowers tend to be independent thinkers with strong views which makes them interesting and often courageous people.
“The particularly sad thing about Richard is, he blew the whistle properly but the investigation that followed was superficial,” he says.
“One might argue that if that investigation had been handled properly, he would not be in this situation and life would have moved on.”
Fielding, whose business is back on track, says the matter has gone too far and he has offered to “throw myself under the bus” to help Boyle get justice.
He says it is clearly not in the ATO’s charter to issue garnishees in the spirit of “the hour of power” referred to in the email.
He has written to Mark Dreyfus asking him to use his discretion to drop the charges against Boyle – as he did in another whistleblower case that went to court involving Bernard Collaery, a Canberra lawyer.
Collaery was hounded for years for making public that Australia was spying on Timor Leste to gain advantage during critical negotiations over oil and gas rights in the early 2000s.
In July last year, Dreyfus intervened by dropping all charges against Collaery, a decision Patrick says was politically motivated and due to tensions in the region.
Fielding wants Dreyfus to do the same with Boyle.
“There is not a person alive who believes Richard should spend decades in jail for doing what he believes is correct,” Fielding wrote in his letter to Dreyfus.
“You cannot support Richard being put behind bars for decades, so eventually someone has to see commonsense.”
Fielding says he has not heard back from Dreyfus and says the whole mess does not pass the pub test.
“The case against Richard needs to be dropped now,” Fielding says.
“There are no victims, there is nobody that needs protecting, there is nothing for society to gain by the prosecution of Richard.”
Boyle and Beaston say they are closerthan ever. They now communicate better and share a love of music, as well as a ragdoll cat, Shasti, that Boyle hand raised.
She was the runt of the litter and was failing to thrive but is now a much-loved family member with her own Instagram account.
Beaston says Shasti has played a large part in Boyle recovering his mental health.
He is still too stressed and distracted to even watch a movie but he meditates and has a nightly fix of tuning in to check the progress of SpaceX’s Starship program on YouTube.
“We both adore Shasti,” Beaston says.
“We take her everywhere and she goes to Bunnings all the time with Richard, he just carries her in.”
Patrick says the problem with Boyle’s prosecution is not just the personal cost but the signal it sends to others.
People working in government organisations who witness bad behaviour are likely to stay silent because they see what it cost Boyle, he says.
Military lawyer David McBride, a whistleblower currently being prosecuted for divulging military secrets in relation to the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, in November threw himself at the mercy of the Attorney-General and pleaded guilty to charges relating to leaked classified material. He is awaiting sentencing.
Patrick says the courts need the option of dismissing “jaywalking” charges like McBride’s and Boyle’s if it can be shown the “jaywalking” is of public benefit.
Without that public interest option, Australia’s dismal record of failing to protect its whistleblowers will continue.
He believes the real value of whistleblowing – like the threat hanging over bureaucrats of one day fronting up to Senate Estimates – lies in the way it makes people in power think about how their actions look.
“It keeps people honest,” Patrick says.
“If you have good, strong whistleblower protections, it deters people from doing the wrong thing.”
Originally published as ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle has suffered six years of pain after lifting lid on garnishees
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