Australian Taxation Office Reviews

Pros

great innit is awesome fantastic

Cons

too many old people bludging

Pros

Excellent remuneration, both for income and super. Strict adherence to all protocols that protect your rights as a worker. Flexible hours as a casual. Respectful, clean, secure and reliable working environment. Practically a biome of an office-scape, you could live and die within the OH&S approved, quality controlled confines of the ATO.

Cons

Dull and bureaucratic clerical work full of jargon without much morally or intellectually stimulating substance, but this is as to be expected. Whilst there is much talk about opportunities to branch out in your career at the ATO and in the Australian Public Service in general, much of this is actually quite limited and rhetorical. A lot of workers do 'higher duties' for many years without ever being awarded the concrete status of the APS level position for which they have already proven they are more than qualified. Considering the role of the ATO is to administer government policy, if you are someone who is affected by the knowledge of how policies affect people's everyday lives (basically if you are not an inured zombie) you may struggle with the rigidity of this fundamental job requirement. In this workplace, enforcing policy is necessarily divorced from questioning and changing policy (there is repeated stress on the ATO being 'apolitical') and an inherent quandary (and deliberate tactic) of this is that those who enforce policy to clients are those who are in dialogue with and privy to the policy effects on clients and are therefore most equipped to know the ways it needs to adapt to its audience, however this is decisively refuted as an element of the job. Clients are encouraged by workers to speak to their local member of parliament, to affect policy changes as individuals, despite the qualified aggregation of policy knowledge accrued by workers within the ATO about the client experience. Despite much rhetoric about the ATO wanting its workers to submit suggestions for improvement and innovation, this must undergo the rusty, old process of red tape where you may only see slight changes (that have been heavily modified and diluted) after long periods of time. In light of this fruitless cycle, the job has the potential to turn you into an inured zombie if you weren't already one.

Pros

Variety of work and roles Rewarding Chance to make a real difference Career progression Learning and development Heavy focus on improving staff experience

Cons

Timeframes can be difficult to met, high pressure to achieve results

Pros

Good work life balance with flexible work arrangments

Cons

Career ceiling and worse pay than private sector