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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

I find it very annoying that to do your taxes yourself in Australia you must have an Android or iOS phone. There is no way to authenticate via the web or just sms on a dumb phone.

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Are you meaning business taxes?

Personal tax is via mygov which is SMS 2FA.

Business tax (which I thankfully haven't had to do for a while) has always been "difficult", it was an awful Java applet for a while there.

Edit: I think I realise now my mistake, the new beta/govid looks to be following that path. So iOS/Android only. Old IDs still work for the moment though.

I was talking about business taxes and the business portal. I didn't realize personal tax was different.

This is really what a national ID card with smart card support was made for. PIV card readers are $10-$20.

https://playbooks.idmanagement.gov/piv/gettingstarted/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_7816

Australians get really really antsy whenever the topic of National ID cards are brought up.

I don't think anyone really expects a new government from either side to spend political capital on one, especially given the focus on cost of living/inflation at the moment. (There's a federal election in just over 2 weeks time.)

My sister in law is a tax accountant so thankfully I still lodge through her by paper. I'd rather not have a MyGov account until absolutely required given my expectations of just how poorly that environment is configured and secured.

Last year it didn't need any 2FA for my taxes. Have they made it required now?

They have to do somthing to prevent the epidemic of people paying taxes other than their own.

Same with utilities... I swear I need to provide more PII to pay my utilities than to login to my bank account. Who's going around paying other peoples bills and how do I become friends with them?

Stealing refunds is a problem in the US, because too much was withheld from many taxpayers.