Tax return blues: in a Kafkaesque world with the ATO

I thought I had finally ascended to the ranks of PAYG-ing true-blue Aussies. But the taxman had other ideas.

Poor form: Why is dealing with the tax office so hard?

It is meant to be the season to be jolly. But fa la la la la me sideways, my festive joy has been severely undermined by the taxman. Now don’t start thinking I’m a slippery tax-avoider or some kind of grand-scale rorter — I am a simple wage slave who waves bye-bye to an obscenely large chunk of his salary before he ever sees it, like millions of other Australians.

My problem is not avoiding tax. My problem is paying my tax, or rather the simple act of filing a tax return. And the sanity-sapping, patience-testing, nerve fibre-shredding, hair-tearing frustration of dealing with bureaucratic ineptitude, inefficiency and bizarreness on a level even Franz Kafka would applaud.

Indeed, Kafka’s name came up in a piece I penned for this paper upon returning to Australia after 25 years abroad, detailing the frustrations I had getting back into the system, with particular reference to the difficulties I had prising my tax file number out of the aforementioned ATO.

I had needed to prove my existence with three pieces of identification, totalling the mystical score of 100 points. I needed a driver’s licence (unlikely, since I hadn’t driven in a quarter of a century), an Australian property rental tenancy agreement (impossible on my first full day in the country) or utility bills (ditto).

Almost two months of running around later, including three wasted weeks while Centrelink screwed up my Medicare card application, I finally ascended to the ranks of PAYG-ing true-blue Aussies. Or so I thought.

That fantasy was shattered a couple of months back when I traipsed off to my local accountant to lodge a tax return. “Computer says no,” the nice lady told me when she tried to generate my statement. Apparently the ATO, in the excitement of seeing me crash through the 100 points barrier, had forgotten to actually activate my tax file number.

Several interminable phone calls featuring long waits in auto-response hell, including a Lewis Carroll-esque conversation with the person manning the phones on the main ATO information line who had no idea if there was an actual ATO shopfront in the Sydney CBD, but helpfully directed me to Wagga Wagga and Forster, finally convinced me there was no hope of sorting things out over the blower.

So off I traipsed again to Martin Place where, miracle of miracles, the ATO shopfront survived (apparently they are in the midst of reducing taxpayer-facing bricks and mortar so everything can be done online and they never have to actually see an angry taxpayer’s face again).

After confirming my tax file number had never been activated, I was told I had to fill out a tax file application form again, and provide my three pieces of ID. Fine, I said, brandishing my precious 100 points’ worth of papers, let’s get it over with. The tax office person’s face lit up as she told me, oh no, we don’t actually keep those forms here. You will have to fill out another form to apply for the application form, and we will send that to you by snail mail. Then when you have filled that out and sent it back to us, you will have to wait another 28 days for it to be processed.

I wandered out of Martin Place in a daze. If it’s this difficult for an average schmuck to fill out the standard form to tick the boxes over tax he’s already had gouged from his salary, what hope in hell does the ATO have of bringing the Googles and the Facebooks to heel, or stopping the great tide of cash payments to tradies, or catching the alleged army of rorting landlords and dodgy deduction claimers? Will they send their court summonses by carrier pigeon, after having had them back-translated into Swahili and inscribed in invisible ink after encoding them in some kind of enigma machine?

Of course, by the time things are eventually sorted out and my return is filed, it will be late and I’ll probably get hit with a fine. Thank you, Mr Taxman, for my own personal magical mystery tour of the outer reaches of stupidity and for putting the silly in my season.