The Australian Taxation Office has outsourced thousands of call centre roles to private operators that pay workers significantly less than public servants and use call targets that can leave vulnerable taxpayers exposed, Guardian Australia can reveal.
The call centre contracts are shared between the US private equity-owned Probe Operations, the Nasdaq-listed Concentrix Services and the British multinational Serco and are collectively worth $316.5m, according to analysis of government tenders.
This is in addition to the ATO’s $42.8m worth of contracts with the private equity-owned debt collector Recoveriescorp.
The wide-ranging agreements show how reliant the government’s chief revenue collection agency is on for-profit contractors,…