ATO’s “Digital by Default”

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the ATO’s “Digital by Default”.  While the title is clear and almost non-threatening, the use of the word “digital” is old fashioned and still focuses on the whiz-bang new electronic technology from the end of last century instead of moving on. 

We are moving into the era of Cyber-existence, now we all have access to the infinite universe of CyberSpace.  The InterNet is the structure of connectivity, but CyberSpace is the “reality” that exists using the InterNet for connectivity, and consists of the combination of everyone’s minds united by the digital technology that is no longer newly fashionable nor particularly significant.

What the ATO is presumably doing, though it might be a process that is not deliberate or official, is not just to continue collecting the same taxes but in a new digital way, but to make the tax system applicable to the new era of vastly expanded activity that is mostly taking place within CyberSpace, the virtual universe that has been created out of imagination. 

The real world is becoming an adjunct to this new Cyber Universe.  That is where most business transactions now take place and where a lot of Labour (that is mental but obviously not physical) takes place.  It is growing exponentially and has the capacity to do so without end, but we are just in the early stages as of right now.

An important point concerns hard copy.  When the digital age started, back in the eighties of last century, or earlier depending on how you write recent history,  we were promised the “paper-less office”.  This was when the expectation was that everything in office procedure would remain the same, except that it would happen digitally and not require paper.

Everyone I speak to now jokes about this because of course there is far more paper now.  Even if bills and Solicitors’ Letters arrive electronically, they still need to be printed out.  All that has changed is the person baring the cost, now the recipient, instead of as previously the sender.  However, what has changed is the number of possible reports that can be generated.   Everything has become vastly more complex, and faster, but it has not become paper-less.

The mathematical model is a five-dimensional cyber space, in which our four dimensional real world is embedded like islands poking up over the ocean from a hidden world below.  Part of the real world manifestation is paper documents.  They are the outgrowth of the cyber world that is indeed digital, but it would be wrong to confine our real world to try to exists totally within the virtual world of Cyber Tax and Cyber Government.

There is another consideration for the rapidly approaching future that the ATO should consider as a branch of Government.   The bigger and stronger it gets, the more robust the InterNet becomes and so the more secure is the Cyber Universe.  However it is early days yet, and there could yet be a major collapse in the InterNet and all other forms of electronic and digital technology.  This could come from a natural cause like a major solar flare, or from something anthropogenic  like terrorism or Big Power competition.  There should be a skeleton of non-digital systems to enable re-growth if this happens.

Security is perhaps the greatest risk.  Tax Payers’ personal information will be less secure, the more “digital” the system become.

My biggest criticism is the absurdity of it all.  The Cost of Compliance is enormous.   “Digital” may well be read by taxpayers as code for “detailed surveillance”.  Our Tax System is based on an outdated business model, where everything is examined to make sure it is correct, where business systems in recent decades only look for what is out of the ordinary and examine those exceptions only.  Only those people whose net income suddenly changes or is outside the normal range for their categorisation need the attention of the ATO.  The rest of us should be relieved of much of the burden of compliance. 

At some point computing will cease to be “digital” again where continuous variations in potential will replace the binary up/down of digital computing, and where multiple variable frequencies will be superimposed as in a hologram, but all that is far in the future.

Eventually what happens in CyberSpace will be outside the control of the ATO whether it is digital or not.   This has already happened with the big global companies who shift their income to low tax havens, but will happen more in the future and especially for on line services rather than for coffee or hamburgers which still have a real component to the virtual, corporate world.

I know none of this will be of the slightest interest to anyone at the ATO, and will probably be ignored be the first person who looks at it.  Unless I publish it elsewhere as well, after a suitable time for response from the ATO, as if there would be one.  [At this point I laugh hysterically at my own fantasy of actually being read.]