BY CHRIS SLEE
MELBOURNE — The Australian Tax Office is preparing to sack thousands of its workers, following a 9% cut in the department's funding announced in the May federal budget.
The tax office has taken on several thousand new workers in the past two years to implement the GST and other aspects of the "new tax system". Now that the system is operational, the governmment is demanding savage cuts.
The layoffs are planned despite enormous problems with the new system, resulting in heavy workloads. Call centres are overloaded, meaning long waits in phone queues. The failure of imaging equipment to read activity statements correctly has also resulted in large volumes of error-correction processing work.
Despite these problems, management is planning to sack most temporary staff at the end of August. "Ongoing" staff are also threatened with losing their jobs, though the timing and number of these redundancies are not yet finalised.
The tax section of the Community and Public Sector Union has as yet been slow to respond to the threat. Union leaders are waiting for the full details of management's plans before calling membership meetings.
Feeling that action is needed urgently to save jobs, supporters of the Members First rank and file group have issued an open letter calling for meetings to be held without delay to plan a campaign against the funding cuts.
It now seems likely that union meetings will be called late in August.