Your State's Rates Manual

Beginner in the council rates game? Looking for a definitive guide or "how-to" for rates in your jurisdiction? Well, good luck with that.

As a council employee tasked with administering council rates, there is no clear background you come to the table with. Maybe you are an accountant? Perhaps from customer service? Former animal management officer? Accounts payable? Increasingly, we see the pathway into rates fractured and unwieldy, but not because of the person put into the role - rather, the issue we see is the unstructured and haphazard approach to the position itself.

Rates is hard. Usually, harder than your manager thinks it is. The complexity of rates is well beyond what any mere finance system is capable of, and the compliance with legislation is not for the faint of heart.

So how does one become a rates professional? Get the job, basically. The bad news is, there is little to no formal training availble in the university or TAFE industry, and very basic approaches to professional training at the state level. Some jurisdiuctions have a professional body, such as Victoria and South Australia - and don't get us wrong, these are important pieces of the puzzle - but there is currently no Australian peak body for rates, and no training program across jurisdictions.

This is a problem.

While rates differs from state to state, the vast majority of rates background knowledge is interchangeable, relying on the basic principles of taxation. The water is muddied by each state having 'cultural' practices ("we've always done it this way") which ignore rates options which are legal but unpracticed in many jurisdictions (rates rebates, anyone?). Rates can be a tribal exercise, largely passed down from one officer to the next, rather than a profession in which all rates officers have the basic grounding in tax law. This causes our industry all sorts of complications.

One might think there is at least a manual, a guide to how rates are to be done in your state, let alone in your council. Well! One would have thought this would be a formative, fundamental task for the Department of Local Government in your jurisdiction. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and there are reasons for it. Responsibility for the formulation of rating structures rests with the council (where it should be, in our opinion) rather than with the State Government, and so they look at explaining rates with some trepidation, and rather err on the side of rates capping and other restrictive strategies which are less 'interpretive' and more 'prescriptive'.

So what is a new rates officer to do?

Well, if you are in the Northern Territory, you can access the The Northern Territory Manual for Council Staff working with Rates and Charges, which is bar none the best example of a State (well, Territory) approach to guiding newer rates and revenue officers into the profession. Is it perfect? No. But it has a strong focus on the basics of rates. Hey - based in Victoria, or Western Australia? This guide will still be of enormous benefit, even though the legislation is different, because you might well learn there are things done elsewhere which you could be doing as well. Unfortunately, it is already out of date in the NT, and that brings me back to the real issue.

With no clear State-based or national effort with regards to formalised training in local government taxation, and with easily a third of rates officers wanting to retire in the next 10 years - what is our industry approach to ensuring the next crop of rates officers in local government have both the grounding and professional development avenues available to thrive in their roles?

If you are a rates officer reading this, where is your State legislation guide to how rates are administered? Does it exist, and if it does, is it up to scratch? Let us know! We need to peel back the "we've always done it this way" approach, and look at rates as a profession, because last year roughly $27B was raised in rates across all 563 Australian councils, and we need this to be done right.