Archive for June, 2019

Proof of time travel

I’m off sick from work at the moment, so this seems just a little bit suspicious.

US President (and a great president he is) Donald Trump held a rally in Orlando, Florida today to kick off his re-election campaign. Among the 20,000 people inside Amway Center and many thousands more watching on screens outside, was this person who managed to be in shot right behind the president.

Samuel at a Trump rally?

Is my absence from work merely a cover for jetting off to the States?

While I have assured my boss that it is not me, I have to wonder if it is? You see, I would very much like to help out with the 2020 campaign but I know I won’t have time. So, I would like to think that in the future when I have access to time travel, I will travel back in time to assist the campaign and attend this rally. Given an astrologer did forecast a few years ago that I would become the world’s most powerful wizard, it is not beyond the realm of possibilities.

Interesting twist to time travel technology: you revert to your age in the time to which you travel, limiting the range of available time travel to times in which you plausibly could be alive.

Samuel

4 comments June 19th, 2019 at 05:48pm

How to obtain your Payment Summary (Group Certificate) without a MyGov account

If you work for an Australian business with 20 or more employees, then by now you have probably received a note from your employer’s payroll or human resources department informing you that they will not give you a PAYG Payment Summary (sometimes still called by the outdated term “Group Certificate” by some people) at the end of the financial year, and you will have to go to MyGov to obtain it. If you work in a smaller business, you will hear all about this during the next financial year.

So, what is going on and why do you have to talk to the government to obtain a paper that used to come from your employer?

Well, briefly, the Australian Taxation Office now requires businesses to report payroll information after each payrun using an electronic system called Single Touch Payroll (which is a dumb name as there is nothing “single touch” about payroll unless all of your employees are on a fixed salary, never take any leave, and never leave the business) as opposed to the old annual reporting by a variety of methods. Ostensibly this is to simplify processes at the ATO’s end and make the information they receive more reliable as it now comes directly from the payroll software in use by each business and can’t be manually compiled by the business. For some very small businesses it means starting to use payroll software, but given the complexities of income tax and industrial awards, it is almost a form of madness to not use payroll software.

For employees this also means that information about their pay (such as year-to-date totals) are frequently updated and available through MyGov. Combined with ATO regulations which have changed how and when superannuation must be paid by employers, it also allows employees to see if all of their superannuation has been paid and if not, how much longer it may take for payments to be made. It also means that employers no longer have to provide a Payment Summary, although they can if they choose to.

In the case of my two employers, both of which are large enough to be forced on to the Single Touch Payroll system, one has stated that they will not provide payment summaries and employees should go to MyGov, while the other is still providing payment summaries this year with no word on what they will do next year.

The one downside to this is that it almost forces people through the federal government’s MyGov system. For most people this isn’t a problem as they already lodge tax returns through MyGov or deal with other government agencies such as Medicare or Centrelink through MyGov. However for some people the login system just never seems to behave, and for others (primarily the poor, some people with disabilities, the aged, and people who just don’t trust government websites to remain secure) they just don’t want to use MyGov or have no easy way to access it. This poses a problem when people are being pushed to use MyGov to obtain documentation which is critical to completing the mandatory annual process of completing and submitting an income tax return.

The ATO’s website has almost entirely unhelpful information on how to obtain your payment summary which basically boils down to “login to MyGov, click here, here, and here”. It also adds the handy note that if you use a tax agent, they can obtain the payment summary on your behalf (so don’t worry if you can’t print it out for them as you don’t need to hand it to them). It says nothing about what to do if you do not wish to lodge a tax return through MyGov and don’t use a tax agent. However the page I linked to earlier in this post describing what Single Touch Payroll is does add a single line stating:

You’ll be able to contact us for a copy of your income statement.

While also noting

You can continue to lodge your tax return as you do now.

Thus, if you want to get your PAYG Payment Summary on paper for whatever reason, you can contact the ATO and they will send it to you. It doesn’t state anywhere else that I can find how exactly to contact the ATO for a paper copy of your PAYG Payment Summary (Update: An ATO Spokesperson says you can call the “Individuals Line” 13 28 61 (within Australia) or +61 2 6216 1111 from overseas to request a paper copy of your income statement, which used to be known as a payment summary or group certificate), but working on the assumption that if you want it on paper and can’t or don’t want to obtain it from MyGov, you will probably also be submitting your tax return on paper, and there is a phone number on the ATO’s website for obtaining a paper copy of Tax Pack and you would expect that the people answering that line will be able to either arrange your paper PAYG Payment Summary or put you in touch with someone who can do that. That number is 1300 720 092. (Update: The ATO spokesperson advises this number is only for publications, not for obtaining a paper income statement) (Long gone, sadly, are the days of every newsagent stocking Tax Pack. I have fond memories of childhood when Dad would get two extra copies of Tax Pack, one in case he made too many mistakes and had to start again, and one so that I could have fun preparing my own pretend tax return…who needs video games when you can have hours of fun and calculations on paper?). That number is only able to be dialled from within Australia, so your guess is as good as mine as to what number you dial if you’re trying to do this from overseas. That said, I will be contacting the ATO for clarification of this point, and also to see if they have a preferred phone number for people to call to obtain their PAYG Payment Summary.

Update: As mentioned above, and repeating here to make it clear, an ATO Spokesperson tells me the number to obtain an income statement (previously known as a payment summary or group certificate) is 13 28 61 (within Australia) or our international line on +61 2 6216 1111.

So, to summarise, your options for obtaining your income statement, previously known as a PAYG payment summary or group certificate are:

  • Login to MyGov, link your ATO account, and get it from there
  • Ask your employer for a copy. They are not obliged to provide you with one, but might be in a generous mood
  • Use a tax agent. They can obtain your income statement on your behalf
  • Ring the Australian Taxation Office on the “Individuals Line” 13 28 61 (within Australia) or +61 2 6216 1111 from overseas and ask for a copy
  • If you also need a paper copy of Tax Pack to submit your tax return on paper, that can be requested from the ATO’s publications line: 1300 720 092

If I hear back with clarification of contact points for any of this, I will update the post accordingly.

Update: An ATO Spokesperson has kindly replied to my request with the following information (the post above has been updated with the key details from this).

While it’s not compulsory to have a myGov account, with the introduction of Single Touch Payroll, myGov will provide employees with access to their tax and super information at any time.

Setting up an ATO Online account in myGov is easy. Just go to my.gov.au and follow the instructions.

Employees who have trouble interacting online and don’t use a tax agent can contact the ATO to get a copy of their income statement (formerly payment summary) after 31 July (most employers have until 31 July to finalise the income statement).

Employees can call the individuals line on 13 28 61 (within Australia) or our international line on +61 2 6216 1111.

By calling this line, individuals can order a paper tax return form and their income statement at the same time.

Paper tax return forms can also be ordered on our dedicated publication ordering line 1300 720 092. Income statements are not available through this phone number.

Samuel

June 17th, 2019 at 06:10pm

A return of sorts for 2019

Greetings!

It has been quite a while since I have posted anything on here, and an awful lot has happened in the world in that time. In recent weeks I have come to the conclusion that I am keen to resume blogging on a regular basis, but at the same time I don’t know that I really have enough spare time in the day to blog “on a regular basis”.

That said, I do want to resume, so here we are.

It would be fair to say that, since 2008 I have had a number of periods of absence from this blog. Each time I come back and decide I want to blog constantly and frequently, then find that I have too many ideas that I want to blog about, not enough time to write anything useful about most of them, and end up putting off new posts until I complete the old ideas which, of course, I never do, and the blog grinds to a halt. I have learned from this.

What I propose to do instead is to return to blogging occasionally, sometimes frequently, but not worry about it if I don’t have time to write about everything which I would like to write. Assuming I do go on blogging, there are a couple maintenance tasks I would like to do which will affect the way you view the site. These include:

Updating the overall appearance a bit. The current look and feel of this blog has been in place with minor adjustments since I moved the blog away from Blogger and on to paid hosting all the way back in 2005. It has served the site well, and fundamentally I still like it, but it could do with some updating, especially the main column width which worked very well in the days when 800×600 and 1024×768 screen resolutions were the norm, but these days it is too narrow and is also quite clunky on a mobile device.

Removing aspects of the site which require Flash. Flash is a dying technology, and has been exterminated in a lot of places. Some web browsers make it very difficult to use. There isn’t much on this site which uses it. It is only in use for embedded audio and video. The audio is simple to deal with as this is generally all MP3 audio anyway which anything can play, so embedding a player adds minimal benefit, but embedded inline video is important in some posts. Back in the days when Google was buying YouTube and things like Flickr were shiny and new, I made the conscious decision to not host most of my media content on these external platforms because it puts the content at the whim of those sites. If a site disappears, so does the content. If a site decides to remove it for whatever reason (and we are seeing a lot of censorship by Google and Facebook in particular lately, primarily of conservatives) then the content is gone. Keeping it hosted locally takes up space, but provides much greater control and freedom. The video content on this site when embedded was generally in the Flash Video format, although in some cases I did upload alternative versions in Windows Media and Quicktime formats (back in the days when having different software really determined what would and would not play on your system), so these may need conversion to MP4 format but then should be easily embeddable without the use of Flash.

Another thing I would like to do is write some brief summary posts about various world affairs which have transpired since I last updated the blog, outlining my thoughts on some of these events. Assuming I do this, they may be a bit few and far between, depending on when I think of a subject which requires a summary. I can think of two right now, but I’m not ready to write about them yet.

So, with that, I will leave you for now and move on to the next post for the day.

Samuel

2 comments June 17th, 2019 at 05:30pm


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