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Abstract
This thesis analyses and evaluates Standard Business Reporting (“SBR”) as a measure aimed at reducing the tax compliance burden of Australian businesses. Considerable evidence suggests that businesses in Australia (as elsewhere) are overwhelmed by the costs of dealing with government regulations. Cutting red tape resulting from government regulations, including those imposed by the tax system, has been on the political agenda for a long time, yet only recently the Australian government has undertaken more active measures to ease the burden imposed on businesses by its regulations. One such measure is SBR – a whole-of-government initiative, designed to allow Australian businesses to reduce their costs of complying with government regulations through removing unnecessary and duplicated information from government forms, standardised data collection, electronic lodgement and reporting channels based on a common data exchange language. In its initial scope SBR focuses on tax regulations.
This thesis evaluates whether SBR can effectively address the issue of the tax compliance burden faced by businesses and if so, to what extent. In doing so, this thesis applies a mixed methodology in which both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed. The thesis conducts in-depth interviews and a survey. Both instruments involve all of the four sets of key SBR stakeholders (the so-called “SBR supply chain“): participating government authorities responsible for the development and implementation of SBR; software developers responsible for building SBR into their accounting products; tax practitioners who, more often than not, are engaged by businesses to prepare their tax reports; and, finally, businesses anticipated to reap the biggest benefits of SBR and enjoy reduced tax compliance costs.
This thesis confirms that the regulatory, reporting and tax compliance burdens faced by businesses in Australia are indeed significant. The thesis also finds that SBR, although broadly perceived as conceptually sound and providing businesses with some opportunities to streamline their tax reporting practices, in its current scope does not address the core issues contributing to the high tax compliance costs, and therefore offers limited prospects of reducing the tax compliance burden of businesses.