Australia’s regulatory super-squad says it wants to be friend, not foe, to SMEs

It felt like something out of a superhero movie, but Australia’s top tax and corporate regulators didn’t meet on Thursday to challenge a global villain or alien threat.

Instead, the head of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO), Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and Australian Financial Services Association (AFSA), along with a new commissioner at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), convened to address a much more familiar challenge: small business compliance with torrents of regulation.

Speaking at the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia (COSBOA) national summit on Thursday morning, new Commissioner of Taxation Rob Heferen, Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth, ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb, AFSA chief executive Tim Beresford, and newly-appointed ASIC commissioner Kate O’Rourke faced an audience familiar with – and sometimes fearful of – their considerable power.

From their different vantage points, the assembled regulators had a unified message: small businesses should reach out for advice, guidance, and support before they are required to take compliance action.

In his introductory address, Heferen, who has only spent a month in the role, pointed to new education modules allowing SMEs to keep track of their obligations before the ATO steps in to recoup overdue debts.

Booth said she hoped the FWO would act more as “friend” than “foe” to small businesses, emphasising that proactive compliance with workplace laws – and even small businesses admitting they’ve fallen foul of the rules – is vastly preferable to obstinance and inaction.

It was a similar story from ASIC, which has launched its first prosecution against a company director for allegedly going without a Director ID Number.

The number of company directors to have signed up for the system is now around 2.3 million, many thousands more than when Director ID Numbers actually became mandatory in late 2022.

Enforcement actions taken against businesses and directors operating outside of the rules will be “targeted and proportionate”, O’Rourke said.

Where the regulators differed was on their definition of a small business – Heferen deferred to turnover thresholds, while other panellists referenced employee numbers, exemplifying why some politicians are pushing for a unified definition.

But the overarching message was clear: with great power comes great responsibility, and Australia’s regulators don’t want to fight small businesses unless they have to.