Effective from 1 January 2007, the Institute made some changes to the tax query service, specifically changes to the types of enquiries that our tax team is able to assist you with. This has come about for two main reasons.  
 
In the past few years, the Institute has been increasingly called upon to provide tax advice through the tax query service. While the service was never intended to provide advice, we have come very close to doing so in order to meet the expectations of members and this potentially contravenes the conditions of our professional indemnity insurance.  
 
The second reason was that while we found that only two percent of the membership was using this service, 25 percent of the tax group’s resources were being used to provide the service.  
 
As a result we have limited the tax query service to the following areas:

• Where members believe they have identified a problem with the law/ ATO interpretation of the law and want to bring it to the Institute’s attention as a potential lobbying activity or if they want to find out more about the Institute’s lobbying activities more generally.  
   
  
• Where members are experiencing difficulties dealing with the ATO, or if they believe they are being treated unfairly.  
   
  
• When members want to find out more about submissions lodged or meetings with stakeholders that they have read about in the Tax Bulletin.