"Under 18 and below tax threshold" but 47% PAYG withheld

Hi Earl,

A couple of points, for the sake of other MYOB AccountRight users who have been misled by the MYOB marketing and documentation, like I have been.

1. The employee has not answered questions incorrectly – MYOB AccountRight allocated the wrong Tax Table based on their correct answers. So I’d rather stick to discussing that scenario, please.
(Anyway, how would we know the information the employee enters is incorrect? How do you suggest that we check that the information is correct – ask them to submit a separate TFN declaration on top of the self-onboarding one? In the end, the employee is responsible for ensuring the tax status information they submit to an employer is correct. Employers act on whatever information the employee provides – and that’s what I thought MYOB was going to do for us, based on the documentation.)

2. How does it make sense to implement an onboarding process that does not capture all the information needed to select the correct tax table – and not tell users about it – but then automatically select a tax table based on incomplete information? The fact that the tax table was automatically changed from the default suggests to users that it was changed for a valid reason.

3. If it is true that your self-onboarding is not appropriate for employees under 18, then MYOB needs to state this limitation clearly in the documentation to avoid your paying users becoming liable for unknowingly withholding mistaken tax amounts. After all, our employees did select “Under 18 and below tax threshold”, to which MYOB allocates the tax table “No Tax File Number Resident”. If they are below the tax threshold, then why select a tax table that will withhold 47%? And why not warn us this might not be correct?

4. The MYOB AccountRight documentation very much suggests that it will choose the correct tax table based on the employee’s self-onboarding (screenshots included). As far as I have found, it does not say anything about employers having to confirm that the correct tax table was automatically selected. If MYOB knows that AccountRight won’t always select the appropriate tax table, then why even bother collecting the tax status information? I would much prefer a RELIABLE manual system than an automated system that gives incorrect results without even a warning.

Now that we have discovered this limitation, other than having to rectify withholding amounts, we also must decide how best to adjust our onboarding procedures (again) to ENSURE we manually select the correct tax table in AccountRight, IGNORING whatever AccountRight happens to have preselected based on an employee’s answers. We should have been told about this from the beginning!