OFFICIAL:Sensitive
Reply to: GPO Box 4889 SYDNEY NSW 2001
Right to Know
By email
only to:
foi+request-14061-
Our reference: FOI-2025-01380, FOI-2025-01381,
xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx
FOI-2025-01382
Contact:
xxx@xxx.xxx.xx
Date:
23 December 2025
Notice of Intention to refuse your request for access to documents
Dear Mr Brunne,
I refer to your Freedom of Information (
FOI) requests for access to documents under the Freedom of
Information Act 1982 (
FOI Act) from the Australian Taxation Office (
ATO), which we received on 2
December 2025.
I am an officer authorised under subsection 23(1) of the FOI Act to make decisions in relation to FOI
requests.
Under subsection 24(2) of the FOI Act, an agency may treat two or more requests as a single request if
it is satisfied that the documents sought relate to the same documents or that the subject matter is
substantially the same. In my view, your requests dated 2 December 2025 meet that criterion because
the subject matter of each request relates to the performance of roles within the ATO’s Service Delivery
business area by internally- and externally engaged staff. I come to this view due to the following
factors:
• two FOI requests are seeking job profiles (for internal and external roles) which indicate the duties
and responsibilities of each role; and
• one FOI request is seeking procedures for various work types as well as supplier (being workforce
suppliers) compliance or performance documents which indicate performance/compliance with those
procedures and/or metrics and presumably would be in reference to any particular role’s duties and
responsibilities.
Given these factors, I am satisfied that the subject matter of the requests is substantially similar, and it is
reasonable to treat your three FOI requests as a single request.
Notice under subsection 24AB(2) of the FOI Act
This is a notice of my intention to refuse your FOI request pursuant to section 24 of the FOI Act.
Having reviewed your request, I am of the view that the work involved in processing your request in its
current form would substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of this agency from its other
operations due to its large size, scope and complexity. This is called a ‘practical refusal reason’ under
subparagraph 24AA(1)(a)(i) of the FOI Act.
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On this basis, I intend to refuse access to the documents you have requested. However, before I make a
final decision to do this, you have an opportunity to revise your request. This is called a ‘request
consultation process’ as set out under section 24AB of the FOI Act.
To assist you, I have made suggestions below as to how the scope of the request could be narrowed to
remove the practical refusal reason and enable me to process the request.
You have 14 days to respond to this notice via one of the ways set out below. If you do not respond to
this letter, your request will be taken to be withdrawn.
Your FOI request and background
On 2 December 2025, we received three FOI requests in which you sought access to the following:
FOI-2025-01380
Current job profiles (or equivalent Position Descriptions/Role Descriptions) held in the ATO’s SAP HR
system for the 22 specified Service Delivery classifications and roles. Specifically, you are seeking
the standard Job Profile or Role Description document that defines the duties, expectations, and
capability requirements for each classification and role listed.
FOI-2025-01381
Any job profile, job descriptions, duty statements, capability descriptions, or equivalent documents
used by the ATO for the following external workforce roles:
• EXT Service Delivery
• EXT Customer Service
• EXT TL Customer Service (or any equivalent external Team Leader role recorded in SAP)
• EXT Debt Collection
FOI-2025-01382
Documents used within ATO Service Delivery operations, including operations performed under the
SPC-6894 Outsourced Service Delivery Panel, including:
• Skill Sets Escalation Directory documents
• Procedures for call transfers, escalations and queue/skillset selection
• Supplier compliance or performance documents
Time and resources required to process your request
Section 24AA of the FOI Act defines the circumstances in which a practical refusal reason exists.
Subparagraph 24AA(1)(a)(i) provides that a practical refusal reason exists in relation to a request for a
document if the work involved in processing the request would substantially and unreasonably divert the
resources of the agency from its other operations.
Subsection 24AA(2) of the FOI Act provides that, in deciding whether a practical refusal reason exists,
the ATO must have regard to the resources used for:
(a) identifying, locating, or collating the documents within the filing system of the ATO;
(b) deciding whether to grant, refuse or defer access to a document to which the request relates, or
to grant access to an edited copy of such a document;
(c) making a copy, or an edited copy of such a document;
(d) notifying any interim or final decision on the request.
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Whether a practical refusal reason exists will be a question of fact in the individual case and the
resources available at the time the request is made.
Substantial diversion of resources
Preliminary searches conducted by the relevant business areas, being the ATO People (
ATOP) and
Frontline Resource Management (
FRM) business areas, have identified at least 730 documents on ATO
systems as potentially falling within the scope of your request. I note that this is a preliminary estimate
only, and it may be the case that further documents are later identified as being relevant to the scope of
your request, whether within the above listed or other business areas.
This estimate includes a mixture of word documents, PDF files, webpages and documents in other
formats.
Given the number of documents, I am unable to provide an exact number of pages these documents
comprise. However, estimates provided to me by the relevant business areas indicate that these
documents comprise at least
9,360 pages. This is based on preliminary searches conducted by
business areas to identify relevant documents and, where documents were not in formats where page
numbers were apparent, sampling of those documents to ascertain the likely number of pages. This was
done by selecting a small sample of documents and converting them into PDF files. Thus, part of the
estimate includes an approximation of page numbers for 560 documents (being procedures which you
have requested) for which sampling was conducted to determine each document, on average, consisted
of 10 pages.
Part of your request does not seek specific, discrete documents but rather information which may be
contained in such documents. That being the case, I consider that additional time will be required to
review a document to determine whether the document contains the information which you are seeking,
as it is likely this will not be apparent from the document title or characteristics in and of themselves,
and in turn, whether the document is relevant to the scope of your request.
I understand that you have requested a wide range of documents as part of your FOI request. This
includes job profiles, procedures, directories and supplier compliance or performance documents. While
some of these documents would be simple to review for relevance to your request, others may require
more thorough inspection.
From my understanding of the documents within scope and their likely complexity, I estimate, on
average, that at least half of the identified documents would take one minute to review while the
remaining half would require three minutes to review. I consider that documents such as job profiles,
directories and some procedures where the task described is readily apparent would require one minute
to review. I consider that such documents would comprise approximately half of the total page count,
based on the figures provided by the relevant business area. The remaining half comprises procedures
and supplier compliance or performance documents which I consider require at least three minutes to
review. This is so only documents which have information relevant to your scope would be processed as
part of your request.
Based on 9,360 pages, I estimate it would take approximately
18,720 minutes or
312 hours (or over 44
business days of seven hours each) for an FOI decision-maker to conduct a preliminary review of the
documents currently identified. This does not take into account documents that require consultation
with other officers, in which case further time would be required.
I note that this is an initial search only and does not include any further searches that may be required.
In addition to the large number of documents captured by the scope of the request, it is likely that many
of the documents may contain sensitives that would require careful analysis and assessment. These
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sensitivities would require consultation with the relevant business area and/or document owners, and
each document will require careful examination (as opposed to being processed categorically), to
determine the application of exemptions under the FOI Act, including exemptions pursuant, but not
limited, to:
(a) section 45 – to remove material containing information obtained in confidence;
(b) section 47 – to remove material containing commercial value that would be, or could reasonably
be expected to be, destroyed or diminished if disclosed; and
(c) paragraph 47E(d) – to remove material which, if released, would have a substantial and adverse
impact on the operations of an agency.
Additionally, some documents likely to fall within the scope of your request will require consultation with
third-party entities. This will further contribute to the resources needed to process your request, as
officers will not only have to engage with these entities, but will also need to consider these entities’
input when determining applicable exemptions.
Accordingly, I am satisfied that a significant portion of the documents would likely need to be released in
edited form, due to sensitivities in the documents, the extent of which can only be further ascertained
upon further review of the documents and consultation with the relevant business areas and entities.
I therefore expect that, at a minimum, it would take an FOI decision-maker one minute to review each
page (in addition to the time already spent reviewing the document to ascertain whether it is within the
scope of the request) to determine whether an exception listed under the FOI Act would apply.
Separately, appropriately positioned officers would need to be consulted with (and therefore diverted
from their regular duties) to review these potentially sensitive documents. Based on the identified page
count of 9,360 pages, if an FOI decision-maker spent one minute reviewing each page, it would take
that officer approximately
156 additional hours to process your FOI request.
Given the estimates considered, approximately
468 hours would be required for an FOI decision-maker
to process the documents so far identified as potentially relevant to your request. This does not include
the additional time it takes to continue processing the request, where further time would be required to:
(a) convert relevant documents into PDF format;
(b) identify and remove duplicates;
(c) further review the content in detail including final checks by an FOI officer and business area
examination of any documents to be released; and
(d) collate the documents, finalise any exemption decisions, apply resulting redactions and prepare
a decision letter.
Unreasonable diversion of resources
The Guidelines published by the Information Commissioner under section 93A of the FOI Act set out, at
paragraph 3.201, a non-exhaustive list of matters that may be relevant in deciding if a practical refusal
reason exists, including, of relevance:
• the staffing resources available to an agency or minister for FOI processing
• whether the processing work requires the specialist attention of a minister or senior officer, or can
only be undertaken by one or more specialist officers in an agency who have competing
responsibilities
• the impact that processing a request may have on other work in an agency or minister’s office,
including FOI processing
• whether an applicant has cooperated in framing a request to reduce the processing workload.
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For the purpose of deciding whether the FOI request would unreasonably divert the resources of the
ATO from its other operations, I have had regard to the fact that processing the request and providing
documents under the FOI Act (that is, those documents which are not exempt from production) would
require lengthy consultation – given the volume of documents – with specialist officers with competing
responsibilities and with entities outside the ATO.
In terms of resources devoted to FOI matters, the ATO has a high number of FOI requests being
considered at any one time, ranging from small and specific to complex and/or large requests All
applicants who make a FOI request to the ATO expect a timely and fulsome response and it would be
unreasonable to divert a significant portion of the ATO’s FOI resources to one single request.
In terms of burden on staff and their workflow, I consider the impact of processing this request would be
unreasonable. Given the nature of these documents, the staff required to search for and consult on (and
in many cases have oversight of), are at the Senior Executive Service (
SES) level. The ATO has limited
number of these staff, and even fewer would be in a position given their core duties to carry out and
consult on the searches required to process your request. SES staff carry out critical work as part of
their usual duties and thus, the workload associated with your request would have significant and
unreasonable implications on their workload and the wider operation of the ATO.
It is difficult to quantify the amount of time that would be required to process your request, given the
likely volume of documents that would need to be reviewed, the specialist staff required to search and
retrieve these documents, and the coordination with external entities. However, based on the matters
raised above, if the ATO were to process your request – necessitating a considerable amount of ATO
resources, which would need to be diverted from the ATO’s other operations – this significant resource
burden would be unreasonable in light of the impact processing the request would have on the
important work of the ATO.
Further, I understand you currently have an application at the Fair Work Commission (
FWC) which
contemplates the same or very similar materials as those being sought under your FOI request. Given
that the information contained within these documents may inevitably be examined and/or released
under that proceeding, I consider that it would be an unreasonable diversion of resources for the ATO to
retrieve, collate and review these documents under the FOI Act when it is more appropriate to request
these documents via the FWC as part of your application. FOI is not intended to be a substitute for
available discovery and document production processes in court or tribunals. With this in mind,
suggestions have been provided to you below so that you can identify specific documents or categories
of documents which would go to reducing the unreasonableness of processing your FOI request.
Accordingly, I am satisfied that processing your FOI request, in its current form, would have substantial
and unreasonable effects on the flow of work to be processed within the FOI team and the relevant
business areas, and would amount to a substantial and unreasonable diversion of ATO resources from
its other operations.
Therefore, I consider that a “practical refusal reason” exists under subparagraph 24AA(1)(a)(i) of the FOI
Act.
Invitation to revise your request
Subsection 24AB(4) of the FOI Act requires that I provide you with a ‘reasonable opportunity to consult’
with me, and that I provide you with ‘information that would assist’ you to revise your request.
The practical refusal reason identified above is a result of the broad scope of your request likely
encompassing a large number of documents, the additional resources required to locate the documents
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and the numerous stakeholders needed to be consulted, in addition to the complexities associated with
processing those documents.
I strongly suggest that you consider revising the scope of your request in the following ways so as to
remove the practical refusal reason:
• limit your request to specific, identifiable documents;
• limit your request to exclude documents involving information of an external entity;
• limit your request to only the job profiles specified in your request.
These suggestions are intended as a starting point and may not, by themselves, sufficiently reduce the
scope of your request so as to remove the practical refusal reason.
Next steps
You now have an opportunity to revise your request to remove the practical refusal reasons and enable
it to proceed.
The standard consultation period runs for 14 days following receipt of this notice. If you need more time
to respond, please contact me within the 14-day consultation period to discuss your need for an
extension of time.
During this period, you are welcome to seek assistance by contacting me. If you revise your request in a
way that adequately addresses the practical refusal grounds outlined above, I will recommend
processing it. Please note the time taken to consult with you regarding the scope of your request is not
taken into account for the purposes of the 30-day statutory time period for processing your request.
Within 14 days of receipt of this notice (or a further agreed period) you are required to do one of the
following, in writing:
• withdraw your request;
• make a revised request; or
• tell us that you do not wish to revise your request.
I note that any written response must be received by me before the end of the consultation period.
If you indicate that you do not wish to revise your request, I will proceed to make a decision on whether
to refuse the request on resource grounds under section 24(1) of the FOI Act.
Please note that if you do not consult with me or provide a written reply within 14 days, your request will
be taken to be withdrawn under subsections 24AB(6) and 24AB(7) of the FOI Act.
For more information
If you would like to revise your request or have any questions, please contact the FOI team at
xxx@xxx.xxx.xx.
Yours sincerely,
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FOI team
Office of General Counsel
Australian Taxation Office
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