INTHEBLACK September 2021 - Magazine - Page 36
F E AT U R E
// TA X C L I N I C S
Below: Paul Viola CPA and Helen
Lam CPA from the UNSW Tax Clinic.
AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE
At the University of Melbourne, Professor Sunita
Jogarajan, at the Melbourne Law School, is also seeing
the clinic’s benefits flow to tax law students in the form
of authentic experience with case file management,
interviewing and leadership skills.
“Even though when we teach we use real-world
scenarios, there is nothing like dealing with a client in
front of you, because it is not just facts on a piece of
paper,” says Jogarajan.
“For some of our students, the work was quite
confronting due to the people they met and the
circumstances they were in, but at the end of it
they say they grew so much, and it was a wonderful
learning experience.”
The Melbourne Law School Tax Clinic accepts
clients below the A$60,000 annual income threshold
– the same threshold adopted by the ATO’s Tax Help
program. Unlike Tax Help, however, the clinic goes far
beyond a tax lodgement service. It is able to provide
advice and has an educational element in empowering
people with the confidence and skills to complete their
own tax returns in the future.
While the clinic also receives referrals from financial
counsellors and community legal services, a large
proportion of its clients are students and new migrants
who are trying to navigate the ATO’s self-lodgement
myTax Portal for the first time.
“It’s not necessarily about revenue collection, but
you’re reducing the intervention the ATO has to do,”
says Jogarajan. “It’s about helping people to do the right
thing by educating them what the right thing is.”
POTENTIAL FOR REFORM
Since the completion of the 2019 National Tax Clinic
pilot, the program has continued on a year-by-year
sponsorship basis. However, moves are under way to
switch to an open competitive grant system, which
will enable individual universities to pitch for a greater
36 ITB September 2021
share of the budget pie and potentially enable nonacademic organisations to incorporate a clinic into their
service offering.
Morgan would love to see more structure brought to
the national program, to ensure consistency of service
across the country. While she is encouraged by the
support the program receives from the nation’s leaders,
there is much more that can be done in Australia with
the right knowledge, resources and commitment.
Morgan has also been involved in the international
expansion of the tax clinic concept into the UK and Ireland,
and is hopeful the Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development (OECD) will jump on board. In the
meantime, she is excited by the growth of the movement
internationally, much of it driven by Nina E. Olson, the
American taxpayer advocate widely considered the
pioneer of the low-income tax clinic concept.
Kayis-Kumar also points out that, by supporting
society’s most vulnerable and relieving them of some of
their psychological burdens, the tax clinics have a role
to play in bringing down the economic cost of mental
illness, estimated by the Productivity Commission to be
about A$220 billion every year.
Kayis-Kumar also hopes to use the clinic’s research
agenda to identify systemic injustices in the tax laws in
order to put forward options for reform.
“Identifying the issues and shining a spotlight on
them would affect so many people if addressed,” she says.
“Without knowing what’s happening on the ground
with these clients, we can’t make those recommendations
for reform, but I’d love for us to be in a position where
we could help even more people.
“We have a model that works, we know the clients’
need for help is genuine, and we know there are many
more people out there.”