Board of Taxation Advisory Panel

The Chairman of the Board of Taxation Mr Dick Warburton today announced that the Board has established a high level advisory panel to assist it in the general performance of its role. The Panel draws together 22 of Australia’s leading taxation professionals who have agreed voluntarily to contribute their knowledge and expertise in assisting the Board with its work.

Mr Warburton advised that the Panel would provide a standing, ready source of high level expert advice on which the Board quickly could draw in the course of considering all manner of taxation issues likely to come before it. As such, the Panel will provide a very important additional source of advice to the Board to that provided by the business, professional and other community representative organisations with whom the Board has developed close working relations.

The Panel will also assist the Board of Taxation in maintaining on-going effective links into the community for the purpose of understanding taxpayer concerns and priorities. As with the public more generally, panel members have been encouraged individually or collectively to alert the Board to issues they think it should be considering.

Mr Warburton thanked the panel members for agreeing to take on the role. “I think it is extremely important to the effective functioning of the Board, and the betterment of Australia’s tax system generally, that the Board has an instant access to the sort of advice a panel of this nature can provide,” Mr Warburton said.

The Panel will operate on an ad hoc and strictly informal basis, designed to facilitate open and frank exchanges of views. Membership may vary from time to time and will be reviewed at least annually, Mr Warburton said.

Mr Warburton emphasised that the Board of Taxation would continue with its current practice of hiring consultants to undertake specific research and other tasks for it. The assignment of such commercially remunerated work is subject to Commonwealth Government tendering guidelines. It is therefore possible that persons serving on the Panel could also be employed as consultants to the Board were they to qualify under those guidelines, but such opportunities would not be restricted to Panel members.

The list of panel members is attached.