Complaints to the Australian Taxation Office have increased by more than 40 per cent in three years, coming amid thousands of job losses and serious IT system failures which saw staff sent home and taxpayers left without key services in December.
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The federal opposition has linked the 3347 job cuts by the Turnbull and Abbott governments since July 2014 to the sharp rise in complaint numbers, totalling 34,323 in the 2015-16 financial year. Complaints were across a range of services including form processing, tax return lodgement, superannuation and debt repayment.
Complaints to the Tax Office fell by more than 20 per cent in 2011-12 - from more than 30,000 - after a review of handling processes, and dropped a further 10 per cent a year later.
But since 2013-14 the total number has gone up year on year, increasing by 44 per cent to 2015-16.
Bureaucrats told a Senate estimates committee this month the increase last financial year was due to delays in the processing of tax returns and problems in internal systems related to tax file numbers and Australian business registration numbers, with some permanent solutions implemented.
The Senate was told ATO policies require complaints to be resolved within 15 days or before a date negotiated with the client. The organisation said it "is resourced appropriately to manage complaints" and was exceeding service goals by nearly 10 per cent.
In 2015-16, form processing problems saw more than 7600 complaints, with 7300 related to registrations and 4917 related to account management.
Separately, the Inspector-General of Taxation received 2148 complaints, with the largest numbers related to ATO debt collection, delayed responses for activity statements and tax return issues.
The Tax office said the 34,000 complaints represented just 0.2 per cent of the 17 million income tax returns lodged by Australians, while 1744 complaints were resolved during the first point of contact.
Shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh said the complaint figures did not take into account this month's serious system failures in which as much as a petabyte of data - a million gigabytes - had to be recovered.
Described by tax commissioner Chris Jordan as the organisation's "worst unplanned system outage in recent memory", the more than four-day crash saw customer service websites and internal systems go down due to a failure on computer hardware upgraded more than a year before. ATO management said no taxpayer information had been compromised.
"Job cuts at the Tax Office are making life harder for Australians who just want to pay their taxes and get on with their work," Dr Leigh said.
"While it's been cutting jobs at the Tax Office, the Turnbull government has been increasing personal staff for ministers, paying for ghost flights by VIP planes and wasting money on discredited consultants' reports.
"No wonder complaints are rising - and not just to the tax office."
