Government agrees to Greens’ amendment to TPB reforms bill
An amendment to ban partners from the big four firms from sitting on the Tax Practitioners Board has been agreed to in the Senate today.
The government has today agreed to an amendment to Treasury Laws Amendment (2023 Measures No. 1) Bill 2023 put forward by the Greens.
The bill, which is currently still before the Senate, implements recommendations from the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) Review and also introduces changes to the income tax treatment of off-market share buybacks undertaken by listed public companies.
The amendment to the bill by the Greens will mean current partners or previous partners who are receiving payments from a partnership in bigger firms with more than a hundred employees cannot be appointed to the TPB.
Senator Barbara Pocock said the amendment will prevent regulators from having direct vested interests in those entities they're meant to be regulating.
“This is a straightforward and much-needed change which will strengthen the impartiality of the TPB and its ability to regulate tax agents, without any perceived or actual conflicts of interest,” she said.
Ms Pocock said the measure would “fix the loophole that allows big consultants to regulate themselves”.
“The remaining former PwC partner on the TPB will not be able to be reappointed,” she stated.
“We will have members of the Tax Practitioners Board who are not financially tied to those same large tax agents they are regulating.”
The amendment also requires tax agents to not only report to the TPB if they’ve breached the Code of Professional Conduct but to also report if another tax agent has breached the code.
“This is an important amendment to prevent partners protecting other partners and turning a blind eye to unethical behaviour,” said Ms Pocock.
“It widens the responsibility for unethical behaviour from the individual to others that are aware of their behaviour.”
Ms Pocock said the amendment introduced to the bill was one of the first steps to addressing the unethical behaviour exposed in the PwC tax scandal and has urged the government to pass the bill quickly.
“The scale of the consulting scandal needs to be met with a commensurate scale of reform. The outrage of the Australian community deserves to be met with an ambitious response,” she said.
“We need to make sure that the unethical behaviour of big consultancies assisting multinational firms to avoid tax, and the extraordinary farming of the public dollar to line their pockets, cannot be allowed to continue. We must rebuild the public sector and put the interest of the public at the core of public spending.”
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