What is ato notice & review support?
An amendment, objection or review answered with substantiation — the evidence pack behind your agent’s response.
The ATO does not send one kind of letter and call it a notice. What lands in a business owner's inbox — or their registered agent's practice mail — is one of three different things wearing similar language: a chance to fix an error yourself before anyone catches it, a formal disagreement with a position the ATO has already taken, or a request for information because the ATO is actively reviewing or auditing a return. Each has its own clock, its own form of words, and its own way of going wrong if it's treated as generic correspondence instead of what it actually is.
A self-amendment is the cheapest and fastest of the three — the taxpayer or their agent lodges a request via myTax or the Practitioner Lodgment Service, and the ATO aims to process most within 20 business days. It only works inside the amendment window: 2 years from the day after the Notice of Assessment issues for most individuals, 4 years for sole traders from the 2024–25 income year onward, and generally 4 years for most companies and trusts. Miss that window, or disagree with an ATO position rather than a self-caught error, and the amendment path is closed — the only route left is a formal objection.
Who does what
Your registered tax agent responds to the ATO; CapEasy builds the reconciliation and evidence pack.
Who does what
| Your CapEasy team | ATO notice & review support, the reconciliations and reporting behind it, and the questions list that keeps it honest. |
| Your registered BAS or tax agent | Everything that carries a licence in Australia — rendered exactly as written: work out what goes on your bas, or advise you on it — under tasa 2009 that requires registration we do not hold. |
| You | One conversation with one named person, and the decisions that are genuinely yours. |
ATO notice & review support in Australia
The amendment window closes on a fixed date, and the date depends on who you are
Individuals generally have 2 years from the day after their Notice of Assessment issues to lodge a self-amendment; sole traders get a 4-year window from the 2024–25 income year onward, and most companies and trusts already sit on a 4-year period. Once that window has closed, a self-caught error can no longer be fixed by a simple amendment request — the only remaining path, if the taxpayer still wants to correct the position, is a voluntary disclosure or, where the dispute is with an ATO decision rather than a self-caught error, a formal objection. We track which window applies to which entity before assuming a correction is still available; your registered tax agent confirms it and lodges whichever pathway is actually open.
An objection and an amendment are not interchangeable — they answer different questions
A self-amendment corrects something the taxpayer got wrong on their own return. A formal objection disputes a position the ATO has taken — an assessment, a decision, an audit outcome — and is lodged generally within 4 years of the Notice of Assessment issue date. Treating a disagreement with the ATO as a routine amendment, or a self-caught error as a formal dispute, wastes the response window on the wrong mechanism. Your registered tax agent reads the correspondence and determines which pathway the situation actually calls for; we build the reconciliation file either way.
An audit response is a fixed-deadline document request, and incompleteness is what extends it
The ATO's audit or review letter states its own response window, commonly 14 to 28 days for an initial information request, and every document produced has to tie back to the return under review. A response that answers part of the request, or answers it inconsistently with what was originally lodged, is what turns a routine review into an extended one with follow-up requests and a longer timeline. We assemble the full evidence set against the specific items the ATO's letter names, so the response your registered tax agent submits answers the request completely the first time.
A voluntary disclosure made before an audit starts earns a larger penalty reduction than one made during it
If a taxpayer identifies an understatement outside the standard amendment window, or wants to get ahead of an issue the ATO hasn't yet flagged, a voluntary disclosure is a distinct mechanism from a routine amendment — one specifically built to reduce or remove shortfall penalties for taxpayers who come forward before the ATO notifies them of an audit or review. The penalty-reduction is graduated by timing: earlier and more proactive disclosure earns a materially larger reduction than the same disclosure made once an audit is already underway. General Interest Charge still accrues on any shortfall regardless of when the disclosure is made. When a client identifies an error that sits outside the amendment window, we prioritise turning the reconciliation around fast, not building a longer file first — speed is what protects the penalty position, and the disclosure decision itself is your registered tax agent's.
What your registered BAS or tax agent receives from us
- A line-by-line reconciliation of every figure the ATO's correspondence questions, matched back to source documents — invoices, bank statements, payroll records, whatever the specific query touches.
- A chronological summary of the return as lodged versus the position now being corrected or disputed, so the agent can see exactly what changed and why in one document.
- A substantiation file for every deduction or income item the ATO has flagged, organised in the order the correspondence raises them, not the order they appear in the ledger.
- For an audit or review: a response pack addressing every item in the ATO's information request individually, with the supporting document for each item clearly labelled against the request number.
- For a self-amendment: the specific label(s) changing on the original return, the corrected figures, and the reconciliation showing how the corrected figures were derived.
- For an objection: a timeline of the ATO decision being disputed, the facts and figures underpinning our position, and every supporting document referenced in the case, assembled for the agent to draft the objection from.
