Entry tags:

australia

Living in Australia - The End of the Financial Year (EOFY)
The Australians have wisely set their financial year to end 30 June (and the new one start 1 July). The initial primary benefit of this is that it doesn't clash with the calendar year and all the holiday hoopla that happens in December.

So one can spend money and hop in the ol' caravan for a couple of weeks away over the New (Calendar) Year without having to worry about having to get one's finances squared away first.

Why the mid-calendar year deadline? Not sure. I suspect it may have something to do with the 1915 Income Tax Act that moved the collection of income taxes from local state governments to the Federal government. (Am researching, but haven't come up with a definite answer yet. If I find one, I might post the answer here, if I can be bothered. Then again, who can be bothered knowing more about taxes than necessary?)

FYI: Any reference to a financial year is from when the financial year began: the tax year that ended last week was Financial Year 2008. We are now into day four of Financial Year 2009.

There's a little Australianism called EOFYS (or the unacronymized version: End of Financial Year Sale). Related to a Stocktake Sale, EOFYS is a great time to go out and score bargains as lots of shops and companies get rid of stuff. I scored a WiiFit for just over a hundred bucks AU. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the WiiSport Pack one place was bundling with it, as they had completely sold out in the first two hours of their sale. (Dunno what they're going to do for the rest of the fortnight-long sale.) So I went somewhere else that matched their price for me. Competition is fierce during EOFYS.


General Trivia:

• Taxes are collected by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) and every taxable person has (or should have) a Tax File Number (TFN), almost the equivalent of the American Social Security Number. Almost.^[1]
  
• The Australian equivalent of an American W-2 form is called a "group certificate".
  
• There is no equivalent to the 1040EZ form. Everyone pretty much fills out the same form.
  
• The people clever enough to be computer literate and have simple-ish tax situations file their taxes through a computer program called eTax^[2], available as a free download from the Australian Tax Office.
  
• Tax Deadline Day (equivalent of US's 15 April) is the most appropriate 31 October.
  
• Australians get tax breaks for contributing to the Australian film industry. (No, this doesn't mean movie tickets are tax deductible...but they should be.)

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^[1] Unlike the SSN, the TFN is only used for tax identification purposes, whereas the SSN is often used as a generic serial number. When I lived in the US, I got mine when I was just a wee tiddler, and it was used on my driver's license, as my university ID, and all sorts of things.
^[2] eTax quite a clever little thing with little explanatory help links everywhere, and some impressively subtle hand-holding. I've used it for the past seven or eight years or so. Definitely a lot better than filling out forms by hand. Those whose taxes are complex or who can't be bothered doing their own use a tax accountant. Those who are not clever enough to do their own or hire an accountant generally get screwed.