Bendigo Bank closing down agency model, leaving dozens of towns without banking service
A total of 28 agencies across NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia stop operating from October, while 10 branches in Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania will shut their doors from August.
The agency model, established more than 30 years ago, allowed Bendigo to offer 'limited banking services via third parties in areas where there was not enough customer demand to sustain a branch'.
'Following a review, Bendigo Bank has concluded that its agency model can no longer be supported due to decreasing customer use and other relevant factors and will be retired from October 2025,' the bank said in a statement.
'The bank apologises to customers that use these agencies for any inconvenience.'
Bendigo Bank's chief customer officer consumer, Taso Corolis, said the decision had been informed by 'limited use of these services' and 'an increase in costs and compliance obligations'.
'Bendigo Bank operates more branches per customer than any other Australian bank and Australia's second largest regional branch network,' he said
'We are proud of our regional heritage and are committed to providing face-to-face banking services for our customers.
'To preserve what makes our bank unique, we must prioritise our investments across both physical and digital channels to continue meeting the changing needs and growing expectations of our 2.7 million customers.'
He said the bank would help customers adjust to the change.
'This may be in the form of connecting them with their closest alternate service, including nearest branch or Bank@Post locations, and walking them through e-banking services available, when required,' he said.
The move is sparking outrage in regional communities, who may now long drives if they wish to attend a branch in person.
One such affected community is Queenstown on the west coast of Tasmania. The Bendigo Bank is the last dedicated physical bank branch in town and residents now face a two and half-hour drive to the closest bank.
Speaking in the Senate on Wednesday night, Queensland and One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts warned of the impact the closure of that branch would have.
'This is not only the last bank in town. It's the last bank on the entire West Coast of Tasmania,' Roberts said.
'The locals will have no choice and will be forced to drive two and a half hours over icy mountain roads to the next closest bank in Burnie.'
Senator Roberts said he was 'having to raise' it because Tasmania's senators had 'ignored' the issue.
He accused the Albanese government of ignoring the senate inquiry into regional banking, which had made a number of recommendations,
'The government was supposed to respond within 90 days. It's been 14 months and the government has simply ignored it,' Senator Roberts said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ABC News
10 minutes ago
- ABC News
Queensland's State of the Sector report shows almost 30 per cent of public service earning at least $120,000
The headcount of Queensland's public service has swelled to over 320,000 workers, with almost 30 per cent of state government employees now earning at least $120,000. A new report to be released today reveals the Queensland government's workforce consisted of about 270,883 full-time equivalent (FTE) roles as of March this year. It represents a 5 per cent uptick from 258,012 FTEs in March 2024, with the majority of the growth attributed to an increase in health workers. When this is converted to a total headcount, which takes into account part-time workers, employee numbers climbed from 308,033 to 322,600 over this period. The details are contained in the annual State of the Sector report, which is the first snapshot of the public service since the new LNP government came to power last year. When looking at the total headcount, about 64,500 workers were earning between $120,000 and $149,999 per year as of March — equating to about one in five employees. This is up 38 per cent from the 46,753 workers in this wage bracket the same time last year, when they made up 15.2 per cent of the public service. Another 19,001 employees — or 5.89 per cent of the total headcount — were earning between $150,000 and $179,999 as of March this year. This reflected a 66.7 per cent increase from a year earlier when there were 11,397 workers in this income category. Workers earning more than $180,000 per year made up 2.3 per cent of the headcount — or a total of 7,439 workers, compared to 5,880 employees 12 months prior. Overall, the number of workers making at least $100,000 per year made up 44.7 per cent of the public service and those earning at least $120,000 accounted for 28.2 per cent. In the latest state budget, the government forecast it would spend almost $38 billion on public services wages in 2025-26, with this set to reach about $42 billion by 2028-29. The Queensland government is the state's biggest employer. The State of the Sector report reveals FTE corporate roles — which includes legal services, marketing, and human resources — increased 3.45 per cent in the past year. In comparison, FTE key frontline roles, which includes positions such as police officers, firefighters, and teachers, grew 4.02 per cent. Frontline and frontline support roles, which consist of jobs like security officers, policy analysts, general clerks, and gardeners, climbed 7.56 per cent. Overall, corporate roles make up about one tenth of FTE public service jobs. Health workers make up the largest portion of FTEs — accounting for 42.36 per cent of the public service, followed by education workers who make up 30.16 per cent. The report says the number of FTE police roles increased 3.26 per cent in the 12 months to March following drops in the prior two years. It attributes the growth to a "significant recruitment drive". There was also a 6.04 per cent increase in FTE nurses and midwives, an 8.42 per cent jump in doctors, and a 5.19 per cent rise in ambulance officers. FTE teacher positions increased by 0.23 per cent and child safety case workers ticked up by 0.68 per cent, while correction officer numbers grew 13.88 per cent. The number of FTE TAFE teachers and tutors fell by more than 2 per cent. So too did the number of disability support workers. The report notes the TAFE workforce is designed to "expand and contract" to meet the demand for qualifications and skill sets. The reporting period of between March last year and March this year includes roughly the last six months of the former Labor government and the first six months of the new LNP administration.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
The ATO learned it was being scammed, then paid out millions more to fraudsters
It was a scam so simple it took just minutes on your phone, where you could tell the tax office how much money to pay you, and it came through within days. The ATO loophole was so vast, tens of thousands of Australians stole a total of $2 billion. It was Australia's largest GST fraud. But it did not need to be this way. New details uncovered by Four Corners show the ATO was warned its systems were badly lacking, but even when it eventually discovered the fraud, it continued to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars. The ATO maintains it cracked down hard on the scam, moving quickly to shut down the perpetrators and cut off the money. The case of Linden Phillips would suggest otherwise. It showcases in granular detail the ATO's failures and how, while some loopholes are closed, others are being exploited on a far larger scale. Linden Phillips was no criminal mastermind, but from his home in the Victorian river town of Mildura, he easily exploited giant flaws in the ATO's GST refund system. It was August 2021, and Phillips had just been released from jail. According to court filings, a week after his release, he "opened several bank accounts" in his own name and registered a previously created ABN for GST. That was step one. Next was proof of concept. This could have taken just two minutes and involved putting just three numbers into the ATO's systems. Phillips did this by logging into his myGov account — available on your phone — and going to the ATO's GST page. Here, he said his fictitious earth-moving business had recorded minimal sales for the month. Phillips then said he was entitled to $13,158 as a GST refund. Amazingly, he did not have to specify why this was. At this stage, no one was required to check the veracity of his Business Activity Statement before paying. The ATO simply assumed he had invested in stock or capital equipment during the quarter. As the court noted, "the appellant [Phillips] did not engage in a business and had no income or outgoings for such a business". Within a week, the money was in his bank account. That was the trial run. Phillips was only just getting started. The next month, he lodged 46 separate GST refund claims seeking $821,279 from the ATO. The problem was that Phillips had been in jail for most of the time covered by these claims. Despite this, the ATO paid up promptly. Once again, the ATO had not made a single inquiry before paying the money. The algorithm in its system, rather than any human, approved the refund. To claim such a giant GST refund, Phillips would have needed to spend around $9.7 million on his business over three years. All this while having minimal sales, yet enough cash flow to not bother claiming the GST refund each month. Somehow, this was not a red flag when the ATO was paying out the money. Just weeks after Phillips made his second claim, someone at the ATO twigged that his enterprise may not be legitimate. Finally, there was a human in the loop. An ATO officer rang Phillips and was told the statements had been prepared by his accountant, for which he provided a name and number. "The number was in fact registered to a different person … not an accountant but a painter," according to the court documents. The ATO followed up with a letter to Phillips, which he ignored. As he did to further calls and emails from the ATO. Despite the suspicious behaviour, the ATO did nothing. In the meantime, Phillips bought himself a Porsche and his mother a house. The ATO would sit on its hands for the next four months, giving pause to its claim to have cracked down hard and quickly brought the scam under control. When Phillips was caught, it had nothing to do with the ATO. He was arrested in April 2022 by Mildura detective Vanessa Power, who was searching his home looking for drugs and guns. She checked Phillips's phone and "identified a series of fraudulent ATO claims," according to Victoria Police. That led police to a further 63 other offenders in the Mildura area. It was around this time that the ATO began to take the threat seriously. Four months after it first identified a problem with Phillips's GST refunds, the ATO launched Operation Protego, led by its Serious Financial Crimes taskforce. By this time, the ATO estimates $850 million had been stolen from the tax system. While Protego was operating, then-federal assistant treasurer Stephen Jones said it was "pretty easy to work out whether" some had lodged a "legitimate" GST claim or not. "There's lots of analytics that the ATO can do to work out whether this is a legitimate business or not," he said. That may have been true, but the ATO was not identifying many of these false claims until after the money had been paid. It would take the tax office 18 months to get the scam under control, and by this time, $2 billion had been stolen from the tax system. The ATO said when it launched Operation Protego that it assigned 470 extra staff to verify GST claims, and that by May 2022, "almost all fraud attempts were being stopped". All up, the ATO estimated 57,000 people were involved in the scam. Of these, just 122 have been convicted, while the ATO has only recovered $96 million — just 5 per cent of the money stolen from the tax system. The banks have helped recover another $64 million by freezing accounts. In the years leading up to the scam, the ATO's analysis showed its fraud detection systems, which should have prevented the scam, were not up to scratch. A 2018 report unearthed by Four Corners outlined how the systems were lacking. The report's author, Ali Noroozi, spent 10 years as the inspector general of taxation. Citing the ATO's internal data, he found that its so-called risk assessment systems were only marginally better than random selection. "They have certainly been on notice that their risk assessment tools could do better," Mr Noroozi told Four Corners. The tax office was slow to heed this warning, and then it also downgraded its assessment of external fraud risks from "severe" to "low" two months before the scam took off in mid-2021. It said the likelihood of risk had gone from "almost certain" to "rare". The tax office said it began building and updating new fraud detection systems even before the critical 2018 inspector general report. But the auditor general noted one of the ATO's new fraud detection systems ran a year late and was therefore not fully switched on until January 2022. At this point, it successfully detected the massive fraud, but it still took the tax office a further three months to launch Operation Protego. The auditor general found "the ATO did not have a procedure to respond to a large-scale external fraud event" like the GST scams. Watch as Four Corners investigates one of the most powerful and secretive institutions in the country, tonight on ABC TV and ABC iview. Tax experts said these processes need humans in the loop. "Before money goes out the door, particularly if there's been large changes in a taxpayer's details or accounts, that should be verified," said Karen Payne, who stepped down last year as inspector general of taxation. "Once upon a time, there was a desk audit when you first lodged your GST return to make sure you are carrying on a business that you can verify and these amounts that you're claiming are legitimate." As the Abbott government swept to power in 2013, the ATO was moving away from this model of human verification to an automated system. That would eventually see around 1,000 staff — or half the people in the division responsible for the GST — lose their jobs. "I'm not sure the ATO has ever recovered from that sort of drain of knowledge and drain of skill sets," said Stephen Hathway, a liquidator currently investigating a large-scale GST fraud. "The people [at the ATO] work really hard and diligently, but there just needs to be more of them. And there needs to be more regard to getting out there in the field and making those inquiries." While the ATO has claimed to have contained smaller-scale GST frauds as part of Operation Protego, it has struggled to stop loopholes being exploited by larger-scale scams. Stephen Hathway has seen this up close. He is currently chasing Nahi Gazal, who claims to be a wealthy Sydney property developer, but has been accused of masterminding a giant GST fraud. Gazal and his associates managed to squeeze more than $21 million out of the tax office in GST refunds. They allegedly used fake invoices to claim GST refunds for building projects that either did not exist or had been completed by other developers. Once again, the ATO did not bother to do even the most basic of checks. "It never had any legitimacy," Mr Hathway said. "There's nothing in it that ever demonstrates any act of commerce or enterprise. The whole set of transactions were completely and utterly made up, fraudulent, had no basis." By September 2023, the ATO had issued Gazal with a $44 million tax bill, including penalty interest. Four Corners can reveal that while the ATO was chasing Gazal for that money, it failed to detect that he was using a new string of companies to continue scamming the tax office. Mr Hathway has been funded by the ATO to pursue Gazal over this latest scheme, and has connected him to an additional 22 companies, which Mr Hathway said have fraudulently claimed another $25 million in GST refunds. Once again, Gazal claimed to be a property developer. "Not one bag of nails was bought from Bunnings," Mr Hathway said. But once again, the ATO did not check before paying out the GST refunds to Gazal's companies. Mr Hathway said the ATO never asked basic questions, like the address of the properties being developed, whether a development application had been approved, or to even look at a building contract. "I'm the liquidator after the event. And then when we're looking into the file, we find nothing," Mr Hathway said. Mr Hathway was not hopeful the ATO would be able to recover much of the money, and said there was nothing to stop someone else from doing the same thing. Karen Payne said the tax office needed to do better, as these frauds resulted in less money for essential services. "We should all care because it raises revenues that allow the government … to fund the services that we all benefit from … health, defence, security, infrastructure … it's pretty key part of our democracy." Watch Four Corners' full investigation into the tax system, No Return, tonight from 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
ABC News
4 hours ago
- ABC News
How easy is it to trick the Australian Taxation Office?
Sam Hawley: How easy is it to trick the Australian Tax Office? Well, for fraudsters it's not hard at all and plenty have done it costing taxpayers billions of dollars that have never been recovered. Today, Angus Grigg on his Four Corners investigation into the biggest GST scam in history and how the ATO dropped the ball. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Sam Hawley: Angus, you've been hard at work looking into what's going on at the Australian Tax Office. And you've really been having a deep look into this huge GST scam. Now, this unfolded in no other than Mildura in north-west Victoria. So, take me there and tell me about local resident Sarah. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Mildura is a really beautiful town, an irrigation town on the Murray in North West Victoria. And this GST scam really took off in Mildura. And it really was circulating within a sort of population that you might say is low socioeconomic groups, people on welfare, people with addiction issues. And we went to interview one person called Sarah. She was going through quite a bit of financial hardship at the time. I think she'd separated from her partner who was facing pretty serious charges at the time as well. And she was short of money because she needed to have some dental work done. So one of her friends showed her how to use a business that had been registered and an ABN linked to GST to claim GST refunds fraudulently. 'Sarah': The people that I was associating with at that time, they had done it and told me how easy it was to get a large amount of money quickly. And I just thought at the time it was a good idea because I was in a bit of financial trouble. Angus Grigg: She pretended, if you like, to be a hairdresser, despite the fact that she had no hairdressing qualifications. She'd never worked in a hairdresser, hadn't hired premises, had no equipment. And so she logged into her myGov account and first of all, claimed $15,000 and then did it a second time and got another $15,000. 'Sarah': I don't even really still understand how it went through. I was a single parent and then all of a sudden I'm a hairdresser that's getting this return put into my account with no other payments from clients or anything like that to balance it was needed. Like no proof. Angus Grigg: Now, bear in mind, the money went into the same account as her welfare payments and the money went within about 10 days without any verification, without any checks, without anyone from the tax office ringing and saying, what did you spend this money on? Do you have hairdressing qualifications? Have you hired premises? You know, she just absolutely couldn't believe how easy it was. 'Sarah': Yeah, I just couldn't believe it that it was just sitting there on my everyday access debit bank card. Angus Grigg: Now, the other thing to bear in mind, to receive a GST refund of $30,000, she would have needed to have capital expenditure or bought stock and other items for her hairdressing business of about $300,000. Now, surely a single mother living on welfare, getting family tax benefits, that should have been a red flag for the tax office. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. So Sarah, which is not her real name, just by the way, you've changed that for this story to keep her anonymous. She just tells the ATO she's a hairdresser and then the tax office falls for it. That's extraordinary. Angus Grigg: It is. And the fact that you don't need a receipt, you don't need any proof of the line of work you're in is extraordinary. And that's because the tax office basically fired most of the humans in the loop and started relying on algorithms or computers, if you like, to make these payments. They wanted to ensure the timely payment of GST refunds to businesses. But in doing that, they really opened the door up to fraud. Sam Hawley: Right. Sure. So the tax office wants to streamline things. But in the meantime, people like Sarah are all of a sudden dabbling in fraud. And as we've mentioned, she's not the only one. There's a lot of other people doing a very similar thing. Tell me about Linden Phillips. What was he up to? Angus Grigg: Linden Phillips, once again from Mildura, for us, he was like patient zero. It looks like he was the really one of the very, very early people in this scam. So what happens is that Linden Phillips gets out of jail in August 2021. And he already has a company registered. And so he reactivates his GST registration through his ABN and his MyGov account. And then within a couple of weeks of getting out of jail, he does what I'd sort of call a test run. And he claims $13,000 in GST refunds from the tax office. Once again, no documents, no receipts, no verification required. He gets that money within a couple of weeks and clearly then thinks, OK, I'm going to go for the big one. And so what he does is he lodges 46 backdated GST claims for an amount of $821,000 in GST. And the real kicker here is that for most of the period those GST claims are lodged, he's actually in jail. Sam Hawley: Oh my gosh. Angus Grigg: I know. He just couldn't make it up. Sam Hawley: What does he do with all that money? Angus Grigg: Well, of course, he spends it, right? Within a couple of weeks, the money's completely gone. He buys himself a second-hand Porsche. Somewhat endearingly, he buys his mother a house. But the really damning thing here is that the tax office notice it. Finally, someone, there's a human in the loop and they pick up the fact that, hey, maybe something's a bit wrong here. And so they ring him up and he says, oh yeah, no, it's all legitimate. I'll get my accountant to call you. The accountant never calls. They send him some emails. They write him some letters. He ignores them all. And the really damning thing here is the tax office does nothing for four months. And in that four month period, this scam absolutely explodes. So what we did is we went back and we deconstructed, if you like, the tax office's narrative. And the narrative was that this fraud took off on social media. The tax office noticed it. They cracked down really hard, really quickly, and they brought it under control. Now we sort about testing that idea. Sam Hawley: So the ATO says it did this great job. It cracked down on this fraud. But what actually happened? Because you actually had a look at that and discovered, in fact, the ATO didn't do much at all. Angus Grigg: No, exactly. So Linden Phillips does finally get caught, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the ATO. It all comes down to the smarts of a local detective in Mildura named Vanessa Power. Now, she is attending Phillips's house on a drugs and gun charge, and she searches his premises, his house, and she confiscates a phone. And using the sort of smarts that the ATO should be employing, she sees that on his phone there appears to be a pretty elaborate GST scam. And in fact, it looks as though that Linden Phillips had helped 60 other people perpetrate this scam. Linden Phillips is arrested. And then a few weeks later, the ATO finally launch what they call Operation Protego, which is to crack down on this GST scam. Sam Hawley: Wow. Okay. And at that point, of course, Sarah, who we spoke about earlier, she was also arrested back in December 2022. But the thing is, the money, it's sort of gone, right? 'Sarah': I can't pay it back. It's not even an option at the moment. Or it probably never will be. Sam Hawley: Is there any way the tax office can actually get these funds back? Angus Grigg: Well, this is the point, right? In the end, $2 billion was stolen from the tax system by 56,000 people. Now, the ATO tell us that of those 56,000 people who perpetrated this scam, just 120, I think it might be 122 now, have been convicted. Secondly, of the $2 billion stolen, the ATO tells us that only 160 million, or around 8% of that, has been recovered. Sam Hawley: And, Angus, that money, it really is just a drop in the ocean, right? Because you've also looked at all the other funds that the ATO hasn't managed to collect, and you've spoken to Karen Payne. Now, she's a former Inspector General of Taxation. She basically says if the ATO had collected what it was owed, then we would all be paying less tax. Angus Grigg: Yeah. Karen Payne, she really focused on what's called collectible debt. And that is this sort of giant number that the ATO doesn't like to talk about. And when she started looking at it, it was about $30 billion. Then it rose to about $50 billion. The figure is now $53 billion. And that is the amount of money or taxes that the ATO has levied, if you like, but not collected. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The large percentage of the debts that were due were in fact owned by a very small number of taxpayers or they're related to a small number of taxpayer accounts. So you'd kind of think it's a small number of people you need to be chasing. Angus Grigg: And the point that Karen Payne was making is that if we collected all that tax, perhaps we would not have to pay as much tax, all of us, but also we'd have more money to spend on really basic things like schools, roads and hospitals. Karen Payne, Inspector General of Taxation, 2019-24: The fact that it keeps rising is troubling. So it's fundamental, I think, that we've got good administration of the tax system because the integrity of the tax system is fundamentally important to all of us. It pays for all of the services that we benefit from. Sam Hawley: Angus, despite everything that you have said, which is frankly really concerning, the ATO itself thinks it's doing a pretty good job, right? Because Chris Jordan, who was the tax commissioner up until 2024, he's been putting a rather positive spin on the ATO's work. Angus Grigg: Yeah. This is the really extraordinary thing. Despite all these scandals, the ATO tells us they are doing a great job. Just before Chris Jordan stepped down as tax commissioner, he did a victory lap, if you like, at the National Press Club, and he pointed out all the great, terrific things that the ATO has done. Chris Jordan, Tax Commissioner, 2013-24: We've successfully charted a massive program of transformation. We've cut red tape and we've modernised our administration of the tax system as part of the digital revolution to make tax just happen.
