Incompetent Australians?
Lost receipts are costing Australian taxpayers about A$7.3 billion (NZ$9.4b) in total, or about A$1,000 each, according to a Commonwealth Bank survey.
The story in The Australian goes on to mention that Commonwealth Bank is introducing a product to help, so this is basically an advertising press release. I can’t find out whether the survey is a real survey or some sort of bogus poll (there’s nothing on the Commonwealth Bank media releases page, for example), but there’s clearly something strange about the figures. If you divde $7.3 billion by $1000, you get 7.3 million. If you do the same calculations for the time spent looking for receipts, you get about the same figure. But there are about 12 million Australians who lodge individual tax returns (14.6 million tax returns, 84.7% for individuals), so these figures don’t seem to add up.
[Update (28/8): the media release is up now, but it doesn’t clarify much. The description suggests this is a bogus poll with reweighting to Census totals, but that doesn’t explain the discrepancy with actual tax returns]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »