E-tax to be available for Australian taxpayers running Macintosh computers

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E-tax for Mac | 2013 ATO tax returns | $5.2m to put e-tax on Mac

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Previously, the Australian Tax Office had offered their E-Tax desktop tax-preparation software just for Windows PCs. This put Apple Macintosh users at a disadvantage if they wanted to use this software to prepare their tax returns, with them running Windows virtual-machine software like Parallels or the BootCamp dual-boot software for this task.

Now they have worked towards porting the current version of the E-Tax software to the MacOS X platform so a Mac user can do the tax preparation using the software as if it is part of the operating system.

But there is a general direction towards Web-based tax preparation rather than the desktop software. This is mainly to encompass other environments like desktop Linux, lightweight OS systems like ChromeBook, along with mobile / tablet setups.

This could be augmented with common file formats representing common taxation documents, mainly to allow preparation of these documents using business bookkeeping software. It may come in to its own with people who prepare their own taxes or have an accountant do this work.

At least this is a positive step to allowing us to work with accounts and taxes in an online manner no matter the kind of IT equipment we use.

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