Too taxing: reducing red tape

Would it be possible to enter Payment Summary information through the ATO Business Portal/Tax Agent Portal and then being able to print payment summaries as pdf files (ideally with immediate email to employee functionality). Currently micro businesses are completing paper copies. These forms are getting more elusive to access. Most micro businesses do not have payroll functions included in their accounting software. Where tax agents are requested to assist with completion of payment summaries, it would be helpful for all parties if the information could be electronically entered.

Currently there seems to be no way for tax agents to access taxpayer superannuation contribution details that the ATO holds. The ATO applies this info in assessing Div293 tax but the tax agent cannot accurately estimate for a client what the Div293 liability will be because tax agents cannot access the info that the ATO holds about contributions made on behalf of a taxpayer for a financial year.

Currently, labels on the income tax returns for reporting foreign income contain only "net income" and "gross income" for various income types. This hides the amount of deductions claimed against foreign income, and in case of individuals - against each income type. It also appears to overly complicate the reporting because the deductions need to be apportioned from D labels for individuals and/or subtracted from income before entering numbers at item 20 on the individual income tax return.

Many inexperienced investors have plunged headlong into crypto investments, in many instances with little or no record keeping nor in some cases any knowledge of the tax treatment of their investments. It would be of great assistance to taxpayers to be able to maintain a registry of their crypto investments online, with the ATO, which could potentially calculate current liabilities. Similarly, akin to the existing autofill functionality, if the ATO were able to build interfaces to extract transaction records from major crypto exchanges or crypto wallets, this would also help.

Currently if your total borrowing expenses are more than $100, the deduction is spread over five years or the term of the loan, whichever is less. i.e. $20 per year - to me this is immaterial and a waste of time to require a whole process to keep track off/carry forward this information. It adds time/cost to the client to do it correctly. I think we should increase this to say $10,000. There is no loss to the revenue, only a small timing difference that will save significant compliance costs.

There are a number of categories of expenditure which can be either capital or revenue in nature (depending on case law) or are capital items with write off provisions attached (eg borrowing costs). Someone actually made this suggestion in the context of a senate inquiry a few years ago - why not simply have statutory maximums set for these kinds of expenses so that people can treat these items as revenue and write them off in the year incurred.

Maybe as little as 10 years ago there used to be a lot of talk about removing the need for individuals to lodge tax returns. This talk seems to have disappeared in recent years. While I agree that the boat has probably sailed on that idea, I think there is a way to simplify individual tax returns by reducing the need for S&W individuals to claim work related expenses.

For payg income instalments, if these are varied and/or it is applicable to choose Option 1 or 2 (due to new income assessment year), the original has to be signed and sent to the ATO by the due date for lodgement . My question is, why in this world of technically and online portals - that this form cannot be digitally signed and uploaded via a link in the business portal to the ATO. Why do we still need to post anything to the ATO???

The borrowing cost threshold of $100 has not been changed for years. Back when this figure was set most borrowing costs were under that threshold. It should be raised to $1,000. It is cumbersome to have to keep schedules of borrowing cost amortisation.