ATO debt collection cycle
There are a great many people in Australia affected by ATO debt collection at the moment.
Most people would already intuitively feel that the Government tends to be up and down when it comes to debt collection. As someone who is on the coalface of people on the receiving end of these debt collection attempts, I can verify that, at least in my experience, there is a clear cycle, and it goes something like this:
- There is some sort of crisis, such as the GFC or Covid, and the Government loosens the purse strings, and also goes easy on debt collection.
- Debts balloon. The Government comes to the conclusion that there are a lot of businesses out there that probably should not still be there, and are only there because of generosity or lax collection practices in the past.
- Aggressive collection. The Government starts to tell the ATO to collect the debts more aggressively. The Government criticises the ATO for the size of the debt. The ATO starts to collect aggressively.
- Economic problems. People start to suffer and scream out. The collection is too harsh. It is affecting the economy. The Government starts to ease up and the generous part of the cycle begins again.
- Debts balloon. The generosity results in increased debts. And the cycle continues.
I started this story with a crisis, because that is the genesis of more extreme action. Normally the action is less extreme. There is still a cycle.
I have a client who had paid $50k in interest. I asked the ATO to forgive it, and the ATO said no. I know for a fact that if I had asked the ATO a year earlier then it would have been forgiven. I know this because another client of mine was the recipient of that generosity. Its all about the cycle.
The cycle is a lagging indicator. It takes a while for people to realise that there has been a change and adjust their behaviour.
Today, we are in the aggressive part of the cycle. Its extremely aggressive, which is made worse by automation. The ATO has changed, the world has changed. Now human to human interaction is decreasing and decisions are increasingly made by people based off very limited written information. I make this specific point because, as most people know, most communication is non-verbal. It could be tonal or based on body language. These things make a real difference. An ATO decision maker who is deciding on your written payment plan, who doesn’t know you, has never heard your voice, and knows you only as a number is not going to be making decisions at a human level, but rather a robotic level. The ATO is increasingly robotic, as are all revenue agencies, and the staff are forced to be robotic and operate within limited parameters. While the ATO in general may have great powers, in practice each person working there is extremely limited, and must follow specific parameters and constraints. There is a real effort to stamp out the human element of any interaction, other than to use it to sell you the outcome, which cannot be changed – to attempt to soften the blow so to speak – if any attempt to do so is made at all.
I have found that most success in dealing with the ATO is based on understanding that you are dealing with a robot. Most humans think that if they could just speak to a person, or if that person could understand them, then everything will be OK. They won’t believe that it is any other way – and why would they? They desperately wish that could be true. The reality is, its a system. Each person at the ATO is a bureaucrat with a limited brief and a checklist. There is no real scope to go outside the checklist. The best they can do is listen and offer a comforting ear. They certainly cannot help you if you use this method.
Dealing with a robot has its advantages, and that is it is programmed a very specific way, to do very specific things. Its cause and effect relationship is always the same. Its non-adaptive. Just as no human can intervene to help you, no human will intervene to help the robot initially unless there is a bug that needs to be fixed and that is discovered at a system level. Its just you vs. the robot. The predictable robot.
The robot makes errors. The ATO was sending out statements of clam en masse to people. There was no human involved in them other than superficially. We decided to defend one, and it forced the allocation of a human on the ATO end because someone needs to turn up to Court, and the human realised there was an error and the ATO was forced to back down and pay our legal fees. The robot executed the function perfectly, it copied the template perfectly, its just the template was wrong when applied to our clients particular situation.
The same issue with director penalty notices and all of these other mass one size fits all solutions to individual problems. There is always a gap. The computer basically relies on people not knowing how to respond or what to do – basically just roll over or bury your head in the sand. But if someone decides to challenge the computer, especially in a unique way, you’ll find it doesn’t know how to fight back.