On Thursday November 16, the OpenAustralia Foundation received the following letter from the Australian Taxation Office.
In it they said “Based on the information we examined during the review, we have determined that The Foundation is not operating as a public library to be entitled for endorsement as a DGR under items 1 & 4 of the table in section 30-15 of the ITAA 1997.”
We do not agree with their decision.
We are talking to our lawyers about our next steps. We will have more to say soon.
Additionally they sent this one today.
Kat and Matthew
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2 Comments
I am a fan of almost everything you do – from OpenAustralia, to Planning Alerts and Morph – and your focus and philosophy, but I have never quite understood why you felt the need to be a charity. Presumably it is because you felt it was consistent with your ethos – in practice it is very constraining and time consuming and my view is that 75% of charities are largely self serving from a financial perspective and should be shut-down. Yours is demonstrably not self serving, once glance at the financials makes that clear, and given the lack of charity audits I think it is remarkably unlucky that you were subject to review.
What matters most is that you financially healthy enough to fund your projects impartially for the long term – why don’t you consider a social venture structure?
I think a Social Enterprise is a good idea but, perhaps I am overly suspicious, but I suspect big political parties would not want to see you having any avenue for support that might erode the power of their financial backers (property developers etc)