C24/2002 RETRIEVAL OF PAYMENTS TO ATO - PROCEDURAL CHANGES & IMPACT ON PAYMENT SUMMARY PROCESSING

Purpose

This Departmental Instruction provides information concerning the impact of the new payment retrieval functionality on processing the retrieval of payments made to the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

Background

On 15/04/2002 the online Retrieval functionality was implemented into IPS.  A Stateline issued on 14/04/2002 provided details of the system changes and the new functionality.

Previously a manual process was used to effect retrieval of monies from organisations.  Specifically, payments being retrieved from the ATO were manually processed in bulk at the end of the financial year with subsequent manual alteration to the Payment Summaries for affected clients.

Benefits – Payment Summary Impact

The new functionality provides for comprehensive details of payment retrievals and reissues to be recorded/displayed against the original payments in VIEW.  Updates can be done in real time and do not require a stock take at the end of the financial year.

In addition, the programs that produce the Payment Summaries have been updated to automatically take account of tax instalments that have been retrieved from the ATO.  This will result in time savings for staff who previously were required to manually amend Payment Summaries for those clients who had tax instalments retrieved from the ATO during the financial year.

New Procedures

Retrieval of payments made to Group and Shared destinations should now to be done online to take advantage of the automatic recording of details and subsequent adjustment to payment records.  However, the new functionality has some built-in limits requiring that retrieval of payments be processed within 4 paydays of the original payment date.

To take advantage of the automatic adjustment of Payment Summary totals, retrieval of payments from the ATO should be processed immediately the Department becomes aware of the need to do so.

Staff should not wait till the end of the financial year to process these retrievals as they will not be able to use the new online functionality and therefore, the Payment Summaries will require manual amendment.

Any payments that cannot be retrieved within 4 paydays must be processed using the current manual procedures.

NO Contact

The National Office contact officer for these system changes is Brett Peluso who can be contacted on (03) 9284 6228 or by email.