SBR on track to reduce business reporting burden

By July 2010, business-to-government reporting will be a faster and more efficient exercise, stripped off the tedious reporting processes currently imposed on Australian businesses.

This is the projection of the Standard Business Reporting unit of the Rudd Government who reported that the SBR program is on track.

The SBR is a multi-agency initiative which aims to make forms easier to understand, easy to automate and easy to connect on-line with various participating agencies.

The agencies represented in the SBR Board are the Treasury, Australian Securities Investment Commision, Australian Taxation Office, Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority, Australian Bureau of Statistics plus representatives from state governments, other government authorities and business councils.

The SBR initiative is expected to save Australian businesses $795 million per year on an ongoing basis.

Currently, the SBR system is undergoing pilot-testing by its six software-related partners with IBM Australia being the contractor to build the core service components. Similar to an electronic postal system, SBR’s core services will enable businesses and their intermediaries to securely submit their regulatory reports to government directly from their accounting software if it has been SBR enabled.

The six software companies in the project are Beacon IT Group, Frontier Software, MYOB, PayGlobal, Software Objectives, and Software Systems and Instrumentation.

Editor’s Note: Any reduction in the time required to lodge business reports to the government is good news to any business, especially to small businesses. According to the ABS, there were 1,964,943 businesses in Australia as at 30 June 2006 of which 1,156,497 businesses, or 59 per-cent, were classified as non-employing. On the preparation of a simple Business Activity Statement alone, we gathered that a quarterly BAS report would take anywhere from 1 – 2 hours not to mention the time required to lodge the report.

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Posted by TFA News Research on Apr 22 2009. Filed under Side Stories, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry