Hi Victoria here from HBA Encompass and today I’m talking about how to deal with ATO debt. So a lot of small businesses over time have been a little lax in paying the ATO because they are kind of like a secondary bank. They give you a loan, because if you don’t pay your GST or PAYG on time, it’s a while until they chase you. Well, those days are gone. There’s two reasons they’re gone. One is the ATO are starting to really chase people who haven’t paid them. And two is that banks are frowning upon this practice, because obviously it’s it’s not a good practice just to use the ATO as a bank. And their interest rate is about 11%, which, while it might be cheaper than a credit card, it’s still not a good way to to manage your money. So if you do have ATO debt, it needs to be dealt with ASAP. The ATO do payment plans, which means that the yourself or our staff can ring up and negotiate a timeframe to pay off this debt. There is an automated service that you can use where you can just pay it off over six months or nine months or whatever it is. And as long as you stick to that payment plan, then everything’s hunky dory. It’s Something that Cherie in our office does quite often, we do of course, charge a fee for it because it’s using one of our staff members to do it. And to get on to the ATO honestly can take up to an hour sometimes. So she’s sitting there doing this for an hour. But if you do it yourself, you can get the same result or sometimes a better result. If you really are in financial distress, then we need to know about it. If we aren’t looking at your stuff or your work on a regular basis, we may not realize that this is the case. And we can work with you to try and turn that around. But the big thing is if you do go on an ATO payment plan you need make sure those payments are made before the due date each month that the’re due because as soon as you don’t meet one of those payments, it puts the payment plan off the rails and the ATO are a bit lax to then in make another payment plan. The other thing is that while you are on a payment plan, you are required to meet all your BAS obligations or IAS obligations on time, in full moving forward. So if you are having issues contact us and we can talk to the ATO but also we probably need to sit down and look at a cash flow plan for you as well to help you out of that hole. So that’s managing ATO debts, if you do need some help, contact the office 54447094 or our website hbaencompass.com.au, you can book appointments from there.