Matt Harris

So late payment penalty interest is always accruing on the debt.

Late payment penalty on top.

One a month, one a month, one a month.

That is an exponential curve.

And like all good things at compounds.

Yeah.

So you can see like, you know, we didn't do any math on that, but if you're watching this, you do some mental arithmetic and you can figure out pretty quickly how it could spiral.

Yeah, that's right.

And so the other thing, like to the narrative of all this, right, is that we're suddenly hearing about this in the –

in the newspapers, this debt book hasn't just gone to $9.2 billion overnight.

This has been going on for many years and what happened is post-COVID in their revenue had been a little lighter on taxpayers, which is probably the right approach.

But now they've got to this point where the debt book's so big that they actually have to be twice as hard as they would usually be.

So to give you a great example of that, in our work we often deal with people who have missed tax payments for various reasons and they can be quite legitimate reasons.

for it, you don't have the cash flow at the time, maybe there was an emergency in your life or you gave birth to your first child or whatever, there's lots of reasons why people miss by a little bit.

A common strategy that we would employ in our work is we'd say okay well your core tax was say $10,000, there's $1,000 of penalty and $1,000 of interest and we'd go down that revenue and go hey we'll pay the core tax, we'll maybe pay the use of any interest but can you write off the penalty?

Yeah.

Commonly, going back four or five years, that would be an easy conversation and one that they would do most of the time unless you're a repeater.

But now we're pretty much getting flat nose across the board.

Oh, really?

They're not negotiating?