Has the tax office gone mad?

From what I understand even ATO staff are frustrated with the system both on a personal and professional level.

Bottom line is that because the ATO has been so severely culled, there is a little point in trying to complain about the system or try and sort out alternatives.

I’ve never had an issue with mygov. The auto generated username is a bit of a pain but I find it easy enough to use and lodging my tax has been much faster than previously.

JC said :

OP think you will find they still send out a letter to you.

And not sure why it was so hard to get your letter anyway. Mine same as you got email to say there was a message. Open, click on the link and the PDF of my tax return notice poped up within a few seconds.

No they don’t send letters once you have used mygov to link to your tax. In previous years they have but it has changed in the last 12 months or so according to the tax person I spoke to. The problems with this system arise when no notifications are received to say you have messages in your mygov inbox or you get the notifications and can’t log in to mygov to read them. In my case I was quite annoyed they redid last years return, hit me with a bill and then just stuck a bunch of messages on mygov without ever checking to see if these were actually read by me.

chewy14 said :

Really?
I’ve found MyGov extremely easy to use and far, far easier than the previous systems.

This. Although far from perfect it’s far better than etax and all that garbage.

OP think you will find they still send out a letter to you.

And not sure why it was so hard to get your letter anyway. Mine same as you got email to say there was a message. Open, click on the link and the PDF of my tax return notice poped up within a few seconds.

Still I couldn’t connect mygov to any of the linked services.

Some (quite a bit, probably) of the blame can be placed at the feet of politicians (of all stripes) who are forever fiddling with things in the search for savings and/or votes, but the tax part of this system is, for all of that, very clunky – and miles behind (even allowing for the detailed subject matter) just about every private sector site I use.

MyGov won’t even let you choose an ID for signing in, they give you one with two letters and six numbers. You cannot change it. And don’t try to use the word Anzac as a password, they’ve blocked that word. I tried to register ANZAC803, the address of my father’s milk bar in Maroubra Sydney when I was born but they wouldn’t let me. I had to choose another password.

Really?
I’ve found MyGov extremely easy to use and far, far easier than the previous systems.

Chasing up my tax refund I logged into mygov (after many weeks of trying – another story in itself) to find all these messages from the ATO dating back 6 months that I had received no notifications for. They had redone last years return, issued me with a bill, and then applied my latest refund against it. I still owed them money, was being charged interest and had not received one thing in the mail from them! Outrageous. When I rang them to sort it out they said they had quite a few people complaining and then made me go through a huge process to have letters sent by normal mail again.