It used to be a simple task for me, but now it’s getting more complicated to the point that I have to enlist the help of accountant to do it properly.

This year’s complexity mostly caused by my purchase of AGL few years ago. Sometimes down the line AGL bought Alinta, so I then own 2 shares of AGK (the new code for AGL) and Alinta. But not long after that Alinta was sold to Babcock and Brown and in returns I’ve got another 5 different shares! What a mess! I sold them all.

Anyway, my point of this post is, there’s got to be a better way to do Tax Return. If you think about it, in Australia, you’d have to supply Tax File Number (TFN) for a lot of occasions like opening term deposits, bank account, managed funds or buying shares. So why can’t the government just gather information from the financial institutions based on this TFN? Sure, we cannot trust any automated process just like that, but wouldn’t be nice to have a centralized automated system that work out roughly how your Tax Return should look like and then you can do your own homework to double check the correctness of it. 

This manual process (and paper based) of doing Tax Return is quite annoying to be honest, I spent a lot of time keeping track of dividend payments, deductions etc2.. There’s just got to be an easier way of doing this.