If you have found your accountant or tax agent busier and grumpier than before, you are not alone. There are other factors but a big contributor has been the ATO who in recent years has done its best to make the life of every tax agent as difficult as possible.
Now it is official (again).
The Tax Ombudsman has confirmed what accountants have been saying for years. The ATO’s so called “Registered Agent Phone Line” is not actually staffed by specialists as half of the people answering those calls have less than a year of experience. When you are dealing with complex tax issues, that is not exactly reassuring as many a time the tax agent calling know more than the ATO’s support person and that is no exaggeration.
20 odd years ago, I could call the ATO, speak to someone who knew what they were doing and sort things out in 5-10 minutes. Now you spend one hour on hold, re-identify yourself because the robot didn’t do it well the first time around before a human tells you they cannot help and transfers you to another queue that sounds suspiciously like the same one.
And that is before you even reach the digital side of things. The ATO keeps insisting agents use their online services but sixty five percent told the Ombudsman they still have to call because the system will not let them finish what they start. You begin a task online, get halfway through and end up back on hold anyway. It is like being told to self serve at a checkout that refuses to scan anything over ten dollars.
The review made fourteen recommendations. The ATO agreed to thirteen and declined the one that mattered the most, the one that said calls from agents should go to experienced staff. That tells you everything you need to know.
Every wasted hour on hold, every broken portal and every contradictory answer adds up. Small firms lose time they cannot bill and clients lose patience. And somewhere deep inside the ATO, someone is writing another webinar’s slides about “enhancing the agent experience.”
So if your accountant takes longer to get back to you, know that it is not neglect. It is the cost of working through a system that keeps tripping over its own reforms.
These are not new issues. The Australian National Audit Office highlighted them in 2022 and the Australian Public Service Commission repeated them in its 2025 capability review. The Ombudsman has now printed them again confirming that none of this was an exaggeration or imagined. At this point, the only thing improving is the formatting.