Revision of Taxman adopts open source to jump-start SBR from Fri, 2013-07-19 13:57

The Tax Office has moved to encourage more big business to adopt a government-devised scheme to automate lodgement of financial reports, by replacing a proprietary interface with its systems with open-source software.

The so-called Standard Business Reporting regime has long been touted by the Federal Government as a means to reduce the reporting burden on business by allowing company financial reports and tax returns to be machine-readable, removing manual processes and reducing errors by companies and government agencies.

The use of SBR is also now compulsory for transferring member data between superannuation funds under the Superstream reforms.

But while many small businesses have adopted SBR for filing tax statements since it became available in 2010, there has been little use of it for financial statements and big-business adoption has been almost non-existent, with many viewing it as an additional cost.

In addition, large businesses say they will adopt it only when they upgrade their IT systems, but many software providers have not seen any major incentives to incorporate SBR into their software.

The ATO, which now has responsibility for SBR, said on Tuesday it had decided to replace its proprietary interface with open-source software ebMS 3.0/AS4, which is being widely adopted in Europe, where several countries are mandating schemes similar to SBR.
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