Enterprises submitting Business Activity Statements (BAS) to the Australian Taxation Office will now be able to lodge returns directly from mainstream accounting applications, with the taxman exposing a new Web service directly to software vendors.
When integrated by developers, the new Web service lets businesses send their BAS data directly from within financials packages to the ATO's processing mainframe, which then assesses the lodgements in real time.
The new facility constitutes a major move forward for the ATO's online tax because it eliminates the double-handling of data between applications and the ATO's outward-facing portals and infrastructure.
While the ATO has given much fanfare to its browser-based eTax portal and electronic commerce interface (ECI), both systems have suffered perennial criticism from users at the mercy of bandwidth or load-balancing capacity - usually on tax deadline.
