Tens of thousands of Aussies on social welfare have been ‘educated’ on TikTok about how they could get big tax refunds they were never entitled to. And it’s claimed that the Australian Tax Office (ATO) was asleep at the wheel while a $4 billion fraud was happening!

Westpac bankers claim they saw dodgy transactions and reported it to the ATO but were constantly ignored. However, the Tax Office top brass said they were onto it and were unable to respond lest it blew their investigation.

Also, the ATO said taxpayer secrecy laws meant they couldn’t respond to the banks’ reports to them about suspicious deposits in their customers’ accounts.

It's a case of bank executives versus the tax office and no one can really say what the truth is. The fact that the fraud allegedly spiked to $4 billion makes you wonder if our regulators have productivity problems. And this leads to the question: Are these regulators lazy or under-resourced?

This is another question I can’t answer but our political representatives should be looking for the answers and fast.

So, how did this scam, apparently perpetrated by some social welfare recipients (that ended up making banks suspicious) and helped by TikTok explainers, come about?

The AFR’s Neil Chenoweth explained it this way: “From mid-2021, the fraud exploded as social media influencers on TikTok explained to their followers how to obtain a ‘loan’ from the government. The scam involved people obtaining an Australian Business Number or ABN, then using their MyGov account to apply for GST refunds on huge fictitious expenses they claimed to have incurred in setting up their new business.”

The ATO said the average claim was $20,000. Accountants say it was more like $80,000. All I’m sure of is that we haven’t heard the end of this story.I don’t want to take sides, but you must ask if the adults are letting the ‘kids’ and criminals get away with blue murder, with all this hi-tech and social platform illegal activities.

This headline from CNBC tells us all that we must start monitoring the worrying trends coming out of the tech world:  Bill Gates watched ChatGPT ace an AP Bio exam and went into ‘a state of shock’: Let’s see where we can put it to good use.

Previously, Gates was underwhelmed about what ChatGPT could do saying: “I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s kind of an idiot savant. I don’t think it’s practical,’”.

However, two months later, OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT came back with further improvements. Gates watched ChatGPT achieve the top score of five on a biology test. The program had gone from not being able to read or write “in the sense humans do,” Gates said, to being able to do both at nearly a human-like level, CNBC reported.

Despite the fact that there will be efficiency benefits coming from this new age technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will provide another threat to our sensible lives and orderly economies. Clearly, we can’t be Luddites who wanted to smash the inventions and innovations of the Industrial Revolution to maintain their positions of master craftsmen, but we need our governments to be vigilant about how this technology could ruin businesses and lives.  It could also deprive governments of tax revenue, but the threat could also be an opportunity if AI can learn to better do the jobs that aren’t being done well by regulators.

A world run by AI could be a very scary future!