Mr. David Diment

Mr. David Diment

First Assistant Commissioner

ATO People

Australian Taxation Office

Canberra

14 July 2011

Dear David

I refer to our agreement before Fair Work Australia in case number 2011/140 that the ASU provides the ATO with our requests for information for the purpose of good faith bargaining and for the agenda for our bargaining meeting on Monday, 18 July.

I have set out each of them below. Please let me know if anything is not clear or if I can assist in identifying the information we are requesting or clarify the nature of an agenda items.

Yours sincerely

Jeff Lapidos

Fair Work Act s. 228 (1) (b) request for information

• The ASU requests you provide us with information about the following matters for the purpose of good faith bargaining of the ATO Enterprise Agreement 2011.

• What are the assumptions the ATO has made in its assessment that the proposed salary increase for the next three years is the maximum it can afford over this period?

• What is the inter-relationship between funding, staffing levels, productivity and affordability in the ATO determining how much it can afford to pay in salary increases?

• What are the actual/expected staffing levels, on an FTE basis, for non-ongoing, irregular and intermittent and ongoing employees for the last financial year and for this and the next two financial years?

• How has the Change Program, actual and expected productivity improvements and workloads affected the ATO’s demand for non-ongoing and irregular and intermittent employees?

• How is it the ATO can afford to recruit 8 ½% more employees in 2010-11 while saying it can’t afford to pay more than 3% on average over this three year period?

• How can the ATO afford to continue working overtime while saying it can’t afford to pay more than offered?

• How much has been spent on overtime in the last quarter of 2010-2011, by Sub Plan. What is the expected level of overtime payments in the next three years – by Sub-Plan?

• How can the ATO say it aims to be a world class tax administration yet it cannot afford to fund salary increases in excess of expected inflation rates?

• What role will the ATO have in relation to the carbon tax? How it will affect workloads in the ATO? Does the ATO expect to get funding for this work?

Agenda items for bargaining meeting on 18 July 2011

• We need to discuss with the ATO the interrelationship between funding, workloads, staffing levels and affordability over each of the three years proposed to be covered by the proposed enterprise agreement.

• We seek the ATO’s view on the impact of the delay in making its new enterprise agreement. We seek confirmation that the delay in making the agreement doesn’t reduce the funding available for the pay rise under the Agreement. We are concerned that some senior managers have said the delay increases the funding available to the ATO for other purposes. Does the ATO agree this is misleading?

• We want to identify the blockers in achieving an Agreement. What are the Commissioner’s directives to the Bargaining Team on issues that are beyond negotiation?

• Even when the ATO was contemplating 1600 redundancies, the ATO still offered a 3.2% pay increase and the two days Christmas closedown. The ATO has not had its funding cut, rather its funding is increasing. Why can’t the ATO work with the unions to find ways to keep its employees ahead of inflation?

• Given that it will cost $3.5m to change from FCS to OTE, we want that used towards a salary increase instead. The ATO didn’t tell us it was going to cost $3.5m. We had understood it was broadly cost neutral. So everyone is affected, not just members of PSS AP. This needs to be reconsidered.

• We want’ hour for hour’ back on the table for EL1s and EL2s.

• We want the conditionality of the pay increases removed