The tax office, ‘hired assassins’ and how to gag dissent

The tax office, ‘hired assassins’ and
how to gag dissent
The nation’s tax office has been accused of hiring psychiatrists to diagnose and even
coerce complainants during legal disputes. Crikey’s freedom of information requests
and interviews reveal a worrying culture.
The Australian Taxation Office has been accused of sending employees to “hired
assassin” psychiatrists to silence dissent, discredit whistleblowers and terminate their
employment. Taxation professionals say the ATO has not only ignored calls for
tighter regulation of these powers but appears to have intensified its use of psychiatry
to label taxpayers they are in legal dispute with as “high conflict people”.
Crikey has obtained information under freedom of information about psychiatric
seminars rolled out last month to ATO legal and HR managers by psychiatrist Dr
Kipling Walker from the National Health Group. An email exchange between Dom
Sheil — a senior principal lawyer in the ATO, who oversees compensation for
taxpayers — and Dr Walker reveals the arrangement. Sheil writes:
Here is a link to the website I mentioned on dealing with personality disorders in
legal disputes — the High Conflict Institute
http://www.highconflictinstitute.com
I have five of their books on high conflict people (HCPs for those of us in the know).
I reckon the best is It’s All Your Fault! 12 Tips for Managing People Who Blame
Others for Everything.
I think you would like the first part of the book that identifies the 4 personality
disorders at issue:
• Borderline
• Narcissistic
• Histrionic
• Anti Social
Somewhere in the material they also talk about the corpus callosum, amygdala and
motor neurons of HCP’s. That’s very cerebral stuff (pardon the pun) might be of
interest to you as a brain specialist!
Tony Greco, the senior tax advisor for the Institute of Public Accountants, tells Crikey
it’s wrong to label taxpayers who challenge ATO decisions. “Under the selfassessment system the ATO have rights to challenge an assessment but so do
taxpayers. The tax office doesn’t like losing but they should not label taxpayers who
are merely exercising their rights under the law,” he said.
Steve Davies, the founder of OZloop who is active in the open government sphere,
says the actions of the ATO lawyer mirror the adversarial nature of the legal
profession. “[It] provides a mechanism to label employees who object to the bullying
as ‘high conflict people’ with personality disorders,” he told Crikey.
“The perspective being advocated medicalises conflict and in doing so provides a
mechanism for ATO lawyers and HR staff to mandate psychiatric intervention where
they lack the medical qualifications to make such judgments. This gives rise to a
direct conflict of interest.”
In November 2012 the House Standing Committee on Education and Employment
tabled a report into bullying, finding the reports of public sector cases “particularly
concerning”. The committee accepted submissions from aggrieved public servants
that the fitness for duty test or the mental health referral powers that enable the
Commonwealth and its agencies to compel/direct employees to attend a medical
examination with a psychiatrist is being used “against workers who are allegedly not
performing their duties” and to “intimidate or further bully workers who made
complaints about workplace bullying or other working conditions”.
The Committee was not persuaded by the claims of Annwyn Godwin, the Public
Service Commission’s merit protection commissioner, that the review
powers available to public servants provide “sufficient safeguards” and that the
referral powers have been “exercised responsibly” or “in good faith”. And the
committee was not convinced by the justifications of Stephen Sedgwick, the
Australian Public Service commissioner, that the “referral powers provide agencies
with a flexible tool that allows them to manage genuine cases of illness, including
mental illness”.
Law and public policy expert JA James from APSbullying.com was the first to
publicly articulate the Commonwealth’s use of compulsory psychiatric referrals
against employees in 2011. She examined the literature behind “pathologising”
determined litigants in the paper The Commonwealth’s Cry of ‘Vexatious Litigant’.
“There is a trend in the Commonwealth in misusing labels such as ‘vexatious’ or
‘querulous paranoia’ against genuine litigants and complainants to devalue and
dismiss their claims with the intent of preventing the legitimate exercise of their legal
and policy rights,” she told Crikey. “In some cases, such pathologising by
Commonwealth lawyers is based on discredited literature from the late 1800s.”
Stephen Strelecky is a former Jewish ATO officer who won a very
public compensation case last year against the ATO over anti-Semitic remarks made
by a colleague in the ATO’s Box Hill branch. He complained to management about
the abuse and requested a transfer out but managers refused. One day Strelecky told
his manager the abuse was continuing and he was feeling stressed because they
would not transfer him or the offender out of the area. The ATO responded by
referring Strelecky to eight psychiatric assessments over a two-year period.
Strelecky’s case also draws parallels with the Serene Teffaha case, the whistleblower
that blew the lid off the ATO’s “tick and flick” culture of determining taxpayer
objections. Teffaha, a senior lawyer engaged as a tax technical specialist, was also not
granted a transfer out of her work area where she was being bullied. ATO officers
referred her to a psychiatrist — as revealed by documents obtained by Crikey — within two weeks of lodging her complaint, without her knowledge. Both Strelecky
and Teffaha complained to Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury, who has
parliamentary responsibility for ATO administrative matters. Bradbury has never
responded to them.
Strelecky would not respond to Crikey questions due to a confidentiality clause in his
settlement agreement with the ATO. But a source who witnessed the ATO abuse of
Strelecky told Crikey: “He was referred to five different psychiatrists who were
nothing more than hired assassins.
“The system could work properly if the referral is done in good faith and a plan to get
the employee back to work is negotiated successfully. But it doesn’t work like this
and in reality there is collusion between the psychiatrist and the ATO. One of his
original psychiatric assessments recommended he return to work. It was subsequently
altered to suit the ATO view that he not return to work. This could only have been
done after verbal communication between the parties.”Last year Strelecky finally
received an apology from Shane Reardon, first assistant ATO commissioner. The
letter obtained by Crikey states:
“Personally, I am very sorry that your employment with us got to this point. Let me
be very clear in saying that anti-Semitism is never acceptable and I understand you as
a Jewish person would be particularly sensitive to such behaviour.”
In a bizarre twist, the worker that abused Strelecky was provided with a generous
taxpayer-funded redundancy package to exit his employment.
Three other senior ATO staff have spoken with Crikey but only on the condition of
anonymity. Two of them described an experience of being referred to an ATO
psychiatrist where they were verballed to make “confessions” that they are adulterous
when, in fact, both are happily married. And despite not giving their informed
consent, the psychiatrist still went ahead and did the intrusive assessment. One other
is refusing to attend a psychiatric assessment and will be taking legal action against
the ATO.
Teffaha is now using her legal skills to help others in her predicament. “A number of
public servants have reached out for my help,” she said. “The mental health referral
powers are being used against professionals such as auditors, economists and IT
specialists to distort their reactions and drive them out of the organisation. Taxpayers
would not be reassured to know the ATO is being run like a mental health facility,
with its lawyers as its resident doctors and its employees as its admitted patients.”
Dr William Wilkie, a prominent psychiatrist and author, believes there are corrupt
psychiatrists plying their trade with government agencies. “Enforced referral to a
psychiatrist or psychologist may be used to intimidate and discredit whistleblowers
by assigning negative diagnostic labels,” he said in a statement.
“A whistleblower may be wrongly described as someone with a personality disorder
whose unwillingness to tolerate corruption originates in an intolerance for ambiguity.
Or perhaps a whistleblower is said to have a form of paranoia. I advise
whistleblowers wrongly labeled as paranoid not to tolerate this. Paranoia cannot be
diagnosed unless delusions have been demonstrated.”
Dr Wilkie’s assessment is supported by Susie Rotch, a psychologist and
psychotherapist with extensive experience in clinical practice and research. She told
Crikey: “Whistleblowers are placed in a pernicious double bind. If they attend the
psychiatric appointment they are likely to be diagnosed as mad; if they don’t attend
then they are non-compliant and may be disciplined for being bad.
“The person who does have genuine psychological problems will often welcome a
referral (through appropriate channels) to a helping professional. Of course the
whilstleblower will not. The whistleblower knows that a referral under these
circumstances to a psychiatrist is a double bind and a gross abuse of organisational
and medical power.”
Garth Eaton, chairman of the Australian Justice Tribunal, says as long as the practice
of paying expert witnesses for reports remains in force, government agencies like the
ATO “will continue to foster miscarriages of justice that destroy innocent lives”. The
AJT wants to incorporate a “public fund” to engage consultants to furnish genuinely
independent expert reports which “would counter the reports emanating from highly
paid government appointees”.
Steve Davies added: “The misuse of psychiatry and the willing participation of these
‘experts’ in the abuse reveals severe cultural and systemic issues not just within the
Australian Public Service but in the bodies that regulate the conduct of medical
practitioners and the silence of the Australian Human Right Commission on this
issue. These practices strike at the heart of open government and decency in public
administration.”
JA James has argued the mental health referral powers are incompatible with the
common law requirement of ‘informed consent’, human rights standards and
numerous legislative and regulatory requirements, including the Fair Work
framework, whistleblower protections under the Public Service Act and privacy and
administrative law benchmarks.
Comment was sought from the ATO on all aspects of this story. They declined the
offer.