COSBOA announces the creation of an annual award The Gobbledygook Cup for the worst red tape as identified by small business people and others. The winner will be announced in December.
Peter Strong, CEO of COSBOA, stated today ‘it’s about time we named and shamed the organisations that have developed the worst red tape. Indeed, we should not just name and shame but we should give an award so that they will always be able to remember the time they got things really wrong.
COSBOA and its members have highlighted for years some of the silly, time sapping, morale destroying compliance demands that have been placed on small business people. Now we can formally acknowledge that by a special annual award – The Gobbledygook Cup.”
Mr Strong added ‘we have received four early nominations which can be found on our website. One worthy group is the Department of Human Services who have an Employer Toolkit that supposedly helps businesses manage the government’s Paid Parental Leave process. The toolkit includes four pages of HTML and XML code that a small business can use in their accounting software. That’s right – a government agency is demanding that a small business person break the law and hack into a proprietary software and change the code. This is bizarre and plainly stupid.”
Mr Strong further added “There are also two of our shadow regulators, APRA AMCOS and the PPCA, who have combined to form a new shadow regulator called OneMusic Australia. Through this they are trying to force businesses to pay them a licence fee if an employee listens to music through headphones they are wearing in the workplace as if that is a public performance. They also want business to pay them extra money if music from the business’ premises is audible in the business’ carpark, as if we hold raves in the carpark. Normally there is a car in the carpark. There are plenty of other examples of where they are scamming Australian musicians and businesses. Most of the money collected then goes to huge American music conglomerates to be used probably for fancy parties (or apparently the modern terminology is ‘candles and flowers..?’)”
The States and Territories have also been jointly nominated for their management of workers’ compensation and, separately, for their management of payroll tax. Confusion breeds mistakes and when we are discussing business essentials such as workers’ compensation it should be easy, not hard. Taxing businesses if they employ too many people is also an odd thing.
COSBOA is hoping to receive more nominations (anonymously, if need be) from business people, public servants, corporate riders, and anyone, really.
