ATO Fudging the Numbers to Make Their Performance Look Better? Surely Not.
It turns out the ATO have been fudging numbers and selectively reporting on their performance. Wow! Someone report them to the Tax Office!
Oh, wait a minute.
The Australian Tax Office is determined to reduce average call wait times, and publicly reports on its progress.
In 2021-22 the ATO met its performance target of general inbound callers waiting less than 10 minutes on average to speak to someone. Yay.
But in 2022-23, that wait time blew out to 10 minutes and 49 seconds. Whoa!
What did they do?
They revised the “performance target” to “less than 15 minutes”.
You have to love that. If you don’t meet your target, set a new, easier one and when you meet it, celebrate as if you made actual progress. Presumably senior executives get a bonus to boot.
Kill me now!
But it’s not enough to continually set new, easier-to-meet targets and call that customer service. No, no … the ATO are even tricker than that. (They clearly have a very good accountant)
In order to keep wait times low, the ATO actively hang up on callers - one in four, as it turns out.
Figures published in The Age yesterday show that 26 per cent of callers to the Tax Office are connected, only to have their calls immediately rejected. And without the option of joining the queue or agreeing to a callback.
More than 1 million calls to the ATO have been rejected already this financial year.
And here’s the kicker. The ATO acknowledged it was hanging up on people so as to make the average wait on other calls appear more reasonable.
Remember, this is in addition to already lowering their performance target for 2023-24.
In a statement published yesterday, the ATO admitted 26 per cent of general inbound calls had been “blocked” this year as a “demand management tool”.
Those blocked calls were not factored into the average wait times.
The ATO said …
“Call blocking is used reservedly and intermittently to maintain client wait times at acceptable levels that ensures all calls in queue could be answered by the end of each day.”
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Anyway, it gave me an idea …
Any chance I can defer reporting 26 per cent of my income in order to maintain the amount of tax I pay at an acceptable level?
Asking for a friend.
Being retired, I have the time to make a call, busy myself with other stuff, and after about the usual 30 minutes or so, then get re-directed to another voice, who or which then takes me to someone or something else, and eventually hung up, start over, and so on. Or I could go to a website, and with extraordinary patience and double and triple tries I might then get somewhere, or might phone up. See above. Sometimes I go to an actual physical office where the real people there wrestle with their version of "the system." But at least you can park yourself there until you get what you came for, or they close up or the day. Then you can go home and find the website again, and maybe try calling them.
My physical wire servicing my internet came loose. It took three emails to my provider, who then directed me to NBN, who called me twice, requested photos twice, allocated me a case number, sent me three texts, threatened to call the whole thing off if I didn't respond to the next email in 24 hours, then eventually two nice young boys from the sub-continent came and fixed the wire. In a record three weeks.
All I wanted was a linesman from the county to rock up with his ute and ladder and fix the thing.
If you have stayed with me this far, I suspect you are also retired, or perhaps WFH? If the latter, you would be reading from your phone down at the beach, and are part of this grand movement to reduce productivity to as close to zero as our CO2 emissions will never get.
Thank you for listening, or reading.
The ATO juggling figures to make themselves look good? Surely not. They should be ashamed to admit it and should apologise to those unfortunate enough, who have been subjected to what now seems to be common practice with big business, to then torture the caller with the frustration of waiting while being subjected to repetitious annoying music which is interrupted at regular intervals by a voice telling you that your call is important to them.
Welcome to the modern world.