Five months ago, I did luncheon in the Savage Club on the day after the Federal Budget, ie the Budget where our government reneged on its explicit election promises about capital gains tax issues and negative gearing. [Any wonder that critics are using AI very effectively to create parodies of Albo and his henchpeople? Ridicule is a very powerful political weapon.]
Whilst I was waiting for my guest to show up, I grabbed a coffee and a newspaper in the Social Room downstairs. It is interesting that whilst all the four major newspapers are available in the Social Room, the management of the Club had the prescience to place two copies of the Australian Financial Review rather than one on the table which holds the reading materials.
There already were several of my Brother Savages sitting in corners of the Social Room, grumbling amongst themselves about what they had read in the newspapers about the capital gains tax changes.
I truly wish that I could claim that I am so clever that all I needed was to read the erudite expositions of the journalists of the Financial Review to tell me all that I needed to know about the Federal Budget, but I have to be honest and say it was rather complex. Instead, I had to grab the Herald Sun and read the idiot’s guide to the Budget.
Which leads me to tax time. For all my adult life, I have done my own taxes, without assistance of an accountant. My taxes are pretty simple, mostly. I don’t have a margin loan, or an investment property, or any trust structures. All I have is my principal income (until recently my salary, and now my defined benefit superannuation pension) and my share portfolio based income.
I do buy and sell shares, and usually have losses to declare, rather than handsome capital gains.
I did consolidate aspects of my portfolio during the financial year, and sell off some underperforming shares, which left me declaring a net capital loss of about $45,000.
I shrug at that – I take my risks, even though that mostly is in companies which should not inflict so much pain on me.
What makes me incandescently annoyed is that trying to declare my capital gains events this year turned into a future exercise which repeatedly caused my blood pressure to spike. Each time I tried inputting my capital gains events, one issue came up at the end which stopped me from finalising my capital gains recording – something which made no sense and which had no prompt in the actual capital gains recording tool.
It isn’t just me. One of my friends who does his own taxes and has similar need to record his capital gains had the same problem. When I did luncheon with one of the committee members at my Club a couple of weeks ago, my luncheon companion, who is an accountant, drily observed that he had heard that there was a problem in the MyGov tax platform which was going to cause a lot of people to have to go to an accountant or tax agent to sort out a very very minor item before they could finalise their taxes.
And so I decided, for the first time in my life, to go to a tax agent and lodge my taxes through an actual professional. Whilst she was doing my capital gains tax recording in front of me, she came across the very same problem and had to ring her firm’s help line to work out how to get around that defect in the design of the system.
And of course, being me, I still end up owing money despite my large capital losses, causing some gnashing of teeth.
But when a government system which is designed for self service is not working in a way such that mug punters like yours truly cannot lodge their own taxes for the first time ever (and my taxes are more simple this year than they have been for many years due to no longer getting any payments from my former employer), then there is a serious problem – the designers of the system and the policy makers have gotten so out of touch that they do not care whether it works.
The online tax returns system in MyGov is simply not fit for purpose.
I assume that our beloved elected leaders, Anthony Ellery Albanese and Dr Jim Chalmers, have never lodged their own taxes by themselves, and that they have always counted on accountants to do those for them so as to maximise their deductions for their investment properties.
And that just shows what is wrong with the system and why so many people are angry at the established status quo.
