An article about an ATO drama with a taxpayer who was told he would have interest charges waived only to have the ATO renege on their letter.
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I wonder if the judge can find evidence of anything the ATO does that is accompanied by human mental process?
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It is on record that no advice the ATO gives is binding unless it is in a formal written determination!
My understanding is that even the human on the phone is giving you a non-binding opinion if it goes to court and the human erred and it cost you.
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Very interesting!
I am sure recipients of the Robo letters from Centrelink (and their lawyers), will be encouraged!
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I think that this is a very dangerous determination. It is a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the ATO. They can then do or say what ever they want and not be accountable. What happened to ‘due diligence’, or ‘duty of care’?
The ATO is already a draconian omnipotent organisation, and I think this is making the ATO even more powerful while being less responsible.
How would the average person in the street know whether to rely on a document from the ATO or not?
If the average person was to get a tax assessment, or a notice to pay, etc., how would they be able to determine whether there was a “human mental process behind the letter”?
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From the SMH in 2016 about problems of taxation for dual nationals, it states, ‘American tax code is 74,608 pages compared with Australia’s 3,657 pages’. The ATO has it comparatively easy, but government, not just the ATO seems to have any sort of get out of jail free card they could ever want in a countries lifetime. FWIW as a dual national ‘my’ tax code is 78,265 pages plus the tax treaty. Not sure if FATCA is included in the referenced US page count. 
As a general statement it went when plausible deniability came into being.
An ATO document can be relied on, but many ATO (and other governmental) documents are confusing so as to make interpreting them challenging. Therein lies one aspect of the problem. Even ATO staff below specific specialists have trouble understanding some of it, and get it wrong. In practice if one can demonstrate a reasonable misunderstanding it is a simple correction wasting nothing but time and materials, while a willful misunderstanding attracts the ATO’s wrath.
The holy grail for taxation is for the rules to be predictable (they are not) to enable software to accurately determine an outcome, not that software could not do it with understandable rules. The fuzzy nature of the sheer numbers of rules with ‘ifs’ and often interdependencies are the problem.
OT: Are you aware that pretty much all weather forecasts from top weather services (highs, lows, precipitation, and text such as ‘Patchy fog early this morning. Mostly sunny afternoon. Winds north to northwesterly 15 to 20 km/h shifting south to southeasterly in the early afternoon then becoming light in the evening.’ are all done by computer now? Human involvement is to affirm the words and language used conforms to expectation. Forecasts generally improved when they took the humans out of the direct forecast to ‘forecasters’ only checking it. However the more serious a weather pattern the more oversight from the humans-in-charge; but even then they override the computer generated forecast at their peril if they get it wrong.
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I think that the determination was that letters from the ATO can’t be relied on: “The letter was automatically generated by a computer and, while stating that it was from the deputy commissioner, the full Federal Court decision in Joe Pintarich v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation found machine-generated correspondence could not be relied on.”…
“Tax lawyers said the case raised serious questions about accountability in the technology age, and whether taxpayers could now rely on ATO machine-generated correspondence.”…
The most questionable aspect is where the ATO staff member “said that he had caused the letter to issue but was unable to explain how the sentence in the second extracted paragraph had come to be included. He said he had “keyed in” certain information into a computer-based “template bulk issue letter”. This process had generated the document. He had not read the letter before it was despatched, he said.”
Given that most correspondence from the ATO is computer generated after input from staff (merge document), as in this case. To me this argues that correspondence from the ATO should not be relied on.
OT: Yes I did realise about the BOM. Info on the development of weather modelling (and processors to do it) and comparisons between different countries’ models makes interesting reading.
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Apologies, I did not mean document in that sense. I should have used ‘Publication’…
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