CA ANZ, together with the other professional accounting bodies, has lodged a joint submission for the Independent Evaluation of the JobKeeper Payment. The joint submission focuses on lessons learnt from the JobKeeper Payment (JobKeeper), and responds directly to the following questions:

• Question 1 – Were the key design features of JobKeeper well communicated?
• Question 6 – What were the lessons learned from the implementation of JobKeeper?
• Question 12 – Were there unanticipated effects associated with the design and implementation of JobKeeper?  
• Question 14 – How could the experience of JobKeeper inform future policy developments?

We commend the Federal and State departments for their efforts to share data and adopt consistent design principles across jurisdictions however the pre-existing fundamental differences in legislative design, taxpayer touchpoints and digital services proved problematic.

Therefore, we recommend that the State Governments join the Federal Government in designing a national ready-to-deploy disaster support program for business. Ideally this would involve standardised and scalable business assistance that can be rolled out using an agreed mechanism by the ATO at the behest of either the Federal or State Government, with the costs of that support being attributed to the requesting government.