Some years ago the ATO pushed the use of their online income tax return system which I have used for the past 5 years, its simple and convenient. This year I received an Etax email and - yes, I know, I should have looked more closely - I clicked into my tax return, it all looked the same as previous years. as a self funded retiree, I have little to record on my return before hitting the complete button and it confirming the return of the small amount of tax paid. It was disappointing to discover, this was a commercial tax agent who then withheld a third of my tax return even though they had contributed nothing to the process. Totally my fault but very misleading initial email that made it look as though it was the ATO. I won’t fall for that next year!
Welcome to the Community @peacock
Thanks for your warning. If their solicitation looked like an official ATO communication the ATO may be interested in having a copy as well as your complaint. Are you able to post an image of the (sanitised) email?
Who was it?
How did they get your email address?
Curiosity asks whether you needed to provide your TFN or was it already there?
My experiences of the E-Tax system more recently required me to firstly log into MyGov. This also required a 2 factor authentication using a code sent by SMS. Surely the agency did not duplicate this process?
An accountant could correct me, but from watching my tax preparer their filing software looks essentially like the ATO’s tax software but they have an ‘express lane’ whereby they only need enter the TFN and name. If the link was to the tax agent’s system not to the ATO there would be nothing to duplicate and the tax return would be filed as the agent, not the taxpayer.
Unfortunately there was probably a box somewhere in the process to appoint the feral agent as the preparer, muddying @peacock’s rights for complaint.
I look forward to some further information. It would be interesting to see the ‘from:’ email address as well as the link (URL) that was clicked to help others recognise similar solicitations/scams.
FWIW. ‘Etax’ is a tax return service, ‘myTax’ is the gov. system and requires logging in with password and code verification.
Sorry to hear you were then required to pay for services you didn’t need 
Thanks for pointing that out.
and if it was ‘Etax’ that could be the entire story that it was mistaken for an ATO communication. Not a scam per se.
Just confuse the issue, the ATO had an online tax return system for ordinary tax payers called eTax. I used it for many years but you needed to download and install the software each year.
They discontinued it in favour of their MyTax system available via the MyGov portal.
Apparently many users use an online system called Etax which does the same job as the original eTax and now MyTax but charges a fee as would a tax agent.
I guess next tax return the fee charged this year will be tax deductible.
Yes, and likely some of us still think of what we do on line with the ATO is still an e-tax return. IE it’s a generic term like SMS is generic and not specific to a product, or per the OP what is also a business name, hyphen excluded? Possibly 2014/15 was the last time the ATO used the product and terminology.
