Tax office to cut up to 900 jobs as part of public service reduction

Updated

The Australian Tax Office is planning to shed up to 900 jobs before the end of the financial year, blaming a range of factors including the abolition of the carbon and mining taxes.

Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan emailed staff with the news yesterday, ahead of his appearance before a Senate Estimates committee.

He told staff that efficiency dividends, a planned reduction in the size of the public service and the abolition of some taxes had forced the ATO to review its structure.

"The ATO will have to work hard to achieve a balanced budget in 2013–14 and indeed for the following few years," Mr Jordan said.

"Consistent with messages of increased efficiency and productivity from Government, we should be looking to make savings where we can - both in terms of staffing and supplier costs."

In Senate Estimates the ATO's Geoff Leeper said the cuts will be made through natural attrition or voluntary redundancies.

"Unless there are particular functions that cease where it's impossible for us to redeploy people and those people choose not to take the offer of a voluntary redundancy," he said.

Mr Leeper said he does not think its graduate program will be affected.

"We've made 237 offers to graduates across the country and barring any other advice we'd expect to honour those offers at this point," he said.

Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Nadine Flood blames the Federal Government for the cuts.

"This is a massive blow for tax staff who are already stretched after previous cuts, what it will mean is significant delays in customers and small businesses who rely heavily on the tax office for advice," she said.

"There's no way around that.

"The tax office has clearly said these cuts come as a result of Government policy, including efficiency dividends, the planned reduction of thousands of [public service] jobs and the recruitment freeze - what we're seeing is the impact of Coalition policies."

Topics: tax, public-sector, government-and-politics, australia

First posted