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The Tax Office is exploring ways to streamline business activity statements, including through more pre-filling, as its STP rollout hits a new milestone with small business.
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BAS streamlining in the works as STP hits new milestone
15 May 2019
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8 minute read
The ATO’s STP lead, John Shepherd, addressed small businesses in a webcast with sister title My Business, which you can access for free here.
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Mr Shepherd revealed there are now over 100,000 employers reporting through STP, ahead of the 1 July deadline for employers with 19 or less staff to be STP compliant.
The kind of technology which enables new reporting systems like STP is prompting other efficiencies to be explored within the ATO.
Mr Shepherd said the move to pre-populate data onto the quarterly BAS is one of many options being explored on the back of the new payroll reporting system.
“We’ll be looking to pre-fill the business activity statement from next year with that data, to make that more streamlined,” he said.
Further, the government is looking at other ways the data can be used to streamline reporting processes, Mr Shepherd said.
“There was an announcement in the budget, that people may or may not have seen, around then looking to use that [data] in the welfare system, again to actually remove burden from employers who get contacted about providing proof of income for benefit recipients,” he said.
“So there’s a whole range benefits from here that start to come back to employers where government can use this information to provide better services and not have to continually go back with separate requests to business.”
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