Forward workplan for systemic reviews 2025/26

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About our work plan

Deciding what to review

One of our core statutory functions is to “improve the fairness and integrity of the taxation and superannuation administration through review investigations of systemic and broader community issues, reporting issues that are in the public interest and independent advice to the Government and its relevant entities.”

We aim to complete four systemic reviews per year. Stakeholders from across the community, government and tax profession will be invited to contribute to each review.

Our work plan sets out the areas that we have identified as suitable for broad, systemic reviews for the next 12 months. There are two types of reviews that we may undertake in respect of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) or the Tax Practitioners’ Board (TPB):

• issues reviews which seek to address specific issues of concern that have been identified; or
• assurance reviews which examine key topic areas with a view to providing assurance to the Government and broader community about the Australian Taxation Office (ATO)’s administration of those areas.

The topics have been identified following comprehensive research, analysis and consultation that have included examination of:

• complaints: trends and issues emerging in our complaints and dispute investigations
• environment: social and economic factors affecting the community
• policy: areas of priority and interest for Government and Parliament
• stakeholders: feedback from our key stakeholders.

Principles of good tax administration

We will select topics for systemic review in accordance with the principles of good tax administration. These principles include:

• ease of access
• clarity of communications
• certainty
• consistency
• humanity, empathy and respect
• simplicity and a low cost of compliance
• getting it right
• putting it right transparency

Consultation

We have issued our draft work plan and are consulting with a range of stakeholders about the topics identified in our draft work plan. These stakeholders include:

• Parliament and Government
  • Assistant Treasurer
  • Parliamentary committees
• Public sector
  • Australian Taxation Office
  • Tax Practitioners Board
  • The Treasury
  • Australian National Audit Office
  • Commonwealth Ombudsman
  • Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman
• Private sector/not-for-profit organisations
  • Tax professional and industry bodies
  • Community organisations
  • Academics

This draft workplan is being released for consultation under the Caretaker conventions during the Commonwealth Election campaign. We will seek the views of Parliament and Ministers following the Election and once a new Parliament session commences.

The purpose of the consultation is to ensure that we have identified topics that are most important and likely to be of the highest impact to the broadest segments of the community. Ultimately, the issues included in the final work plan will be those determined by the Tax Ombudsman to be most relevant and impactful.

We will refresh and update our work plan every six months to ensure that it remains relevant and responsive to changing environmental, social and policy priorities.

Our work plan at a glance

This draft work plan contains ten topics for consideration in the coming year:

• ATO’s management of remission of general interest charge
• Payday Super readiness
• ATO’s management of compromised accounts
• ATO’s engagement with culturally and linguistically diverse taxpayers
• ATO’s administration of disclosure of business tax debts to credit reporting bureaus
• ATO’s response to fraud perpetrated by known parties
• TPB’s management of referrals of breaches of the updated Code of Conduct
• ATO’s Online Services for Agents
• ATO’s Client-Agent Linking system
• ATO’s management of small business restructuring plans

Providing feedback

You can download the draft work plan for full details of each topic and more information about the proposed reviews.

We welcome feedback on this document by email to [email protected] by 18 May 2025