PLS Transition Roundtable Key Messages

1. PLS transition roundtable key messages UNCLASSIFIED External Title: ABSIA & ATO PLS transition roundtable Issue date: 23 November 2017 Venue: WebEx Event 21 November 2017 Start: 1:00pm Finish: 1:35pm date: AEDT

Chair: Martin Mane Facilitator: N/A Contact Scott Rumford Contact (02) 4923 1201 phone:

Attendees: ATO – Alex Barnes, Anne Soe, Belinda Sheehan, Brendan names/sectio Woolcock, Chanara Fraser, Christopher Nusser, Craig Woodburn, n Danny Figueiredo, Deanne McPaul, Doipayon Halder, Gary Baxter, Gary Warne, Luke Beaman, Martin Mane, Scott Rumford, Tim de Haan, Timothy Stimson.

Industry – Jack Wee (Catsoft), Paul Li (CCH), Mike Denniss (Class Super), Kathy Taylor-Hofmann, Takuma Ueda (GBST), Sandeep Gopalan (GovReports), Lex Edmonds (Microtax), Mike Behling (MYOB), Kevin Johnson (Reckon), Saiful Larry (Sage), Paul Siriwardana, Richard Puffe (Thomson Reuters), Andrew Sprankling (Xero). Apologies: ATO – Andrew Watson, Ian Scensor, Joe Maxymenko, Michael name/sectio Job, Michael Rowell. n Industry – Jeevan Tokhi (BGL), Briony Campbell (CCH).

Next meeting 5 December 2017 Agenda item: 2 – Previous outcomes and action items As per the action items register, we provided out of session updates and the group agreed to close action items 24/10 – 02 and 12/09 – 01.

Agenda item: 3 – ELS minor forms and reports closure dates We have published a table of minor ELS forms and reports along with their PLS equivalents and are seeking your input on when you would like to see the forms and reports closed, plus some commentary around the reasons behind your preferences. If you would like to have your say, please review the document and return your completed copy via email to [email protected] by COB Friday 1 December 2017. We will then collate the findings and come back to you with some proposals to work through. If you have any questions, please contact your account manager.

Agenda item: 4 – Focus group updates Transactions involving cancelled ABNs

1 Agenda item: 4 – Focus group updates  A number of stakeholders have committed towards a late-January 2018 delivery on the five recommendations outlined in the recommendation paper. The date is still tentative at this stage as we are awaiting commitment from a couple of parties that we need to work together with, but we hope to be in a position to confirm the delivery date at the next meeting. Generic error messaging and ATO business processes during an incident  We are almost ready to come back to the focus group with three recommendations: 1. As a short-term option, change the text on the de-whitelisting error message. On the rare occasion that you are de-whitelisted for a particular service because we might have some difficulty with it, you would get a message that says you have been de-whitelisted or the ATO has a technical difficulty with that service. 2. Extend the functionality within SBR2 so that we can prevent access to a service if there are any technical difficulties with it and give you an error that is specific to maintenance or system difficulties. This is quite a major change and would have a longer delivery timeframe. 3. Standard maintenance response message for complete outages – rather than a timeout error, we are recommending a ‘down for maintenance’ error which would be useful during planned outages for large releases.  The members of the focus group will receive the recommendation paper shortly and we will then share the paper with the broader industry once it is endorsed by the group.

Agenda item: 5 – Tax agent communication  Last Tuesday we held our last tax professionals webcast of the year, which involved a PLS update and addressed a number of questions raised by viewers during the livestream. The recording is now available on our website for on demand viewing. We are also currently promoting it with tax professionals for those who missed the livestream. We had good engagement from the tax profession in particular around PLS, with 800 people viewing through the course of the livestream and over 250 questions raised. We will publish a collated list of the questions plus our responses on Let’s Talk in the next week or so. Your account manager should also have a list of the questions.  We will issue a reminder to tax professionals next week in our tax professionals newsletter about the company tax return form transition date of 1 February 2018 and will also include additional reminders next year.  We also plan on rerunning a number of articles on key messages we want to reinforce, namely around AUSkey and authorisation setup instructions, how lodgment validation has changed in the PLS as well as the value of using pre- lodge checking in the PLS.

Agenda item: 6 – Platform update  The platform has been performing well over the last couple of weeks and handled the largest single batch process last night with about 1 million records Agenda item: 6 – Platform update going out for superannuation contributions. Please note that the normal rules for batches coming in still apply.  The monitoring page does not really reflect the nature of what the batch part of the system is. When you see the BBRP part of the monitoring agent showing that we have a slowdown, it could simply be that we have a queue and it is not processing items instantly. This is normal behaviour as expected within the design of the system and we will change the monitoring tool when possible.

Agenda item: 7 – DSP feedback and readiness Class Super  The ELS closure for the SMSFAR seemed to go quite successfully. Most of the fund returns we have submitted via SBR2 have been successful or returned a valid error.  We raised a couple of technical communication issues via the SBR Service Desk and are working through them with our account manager. MYOB  We raised some queries with our account manager over the last couple of days and they are being actioned.  We are keen to find out what the system shutdown will be over the Christmas and new year period. . ATO – We are currently working through the details internally and will publish a message shortly.  The known outages shows an outage from 10.30pm AEDT Friday 8 December 2017 to 7.00am AEDT Monday 11 December 2017 – can we get confirmation that the systems are out for the whole weekend? . ATO – We can confirm that the published details are correct and the outage will go ahead as planned. Reckon  We did not receive an acknowledgment email for some queries raised with the SBR Service Desk.  There are some discrepancies in the specifications that were published on Thursday (e.g. aliases not having aliases, things reverting back to prior years). Sage  We have a couple of issues that we are dealing with directly through our account manager. The shutdown of SMSF and trust raised a couple of issues in our payload but we have resolved them. Thomson Reuters  We are seeing an increase in call volumes in our support centre since the 11 November 2017 shutdown of trust, SMSF and fund forms mainly from agents who did not setup PLS initially and left it to the last minute.  We have a couple of queries outstanding with our account manager and are working them through as per the normal process. Xero

UNCLASSIFIED EXTERNAL 3 Agenda item: 7 – DSP feedback and readiness  There is a drop in quality in the NITR 2017 v1.10 specifications.

More information is available at https://softwaredevelopers.ato.gov.au/PLSWG.