Highland Accounting Services - The ATO Environmental Policy – Are they taking it seriously?

Highland Accounting Services - The ATO Environmental Policy – Are they taking it seriously?

The Australian Taxation office has an Environmental Policy which can be found at www.ato.gov.au a short extract is as follows.

“To acknowledge the impact the ATO has on the environment and outline the ATO’s commitment to being a good environmental citizen by reducing its environmental footprint.”

Recently, in January 2010, the Australian Taxation Office substantially upgraded their software system, this has resulted in major changes on how the ATO reports to the individual taxpayer in regards to their yearly Notice of Assessment (Tax return).


The average Notice of Assessment has now gone from 1 sheet of paper to 2 sheets of paper, and if the taxpayer has an outstanding debt, or is in business, then the number of sheets of paper will increase even further as they will receive a statement of account. One may ask themselves, what is the extra information about the taxpayer that is included on the extra paperwork, well nothing, fundamentally it is the same information just formatted across more paperwork.
So you may be asking, what is another sheet of paper? Try over 12 million sheets of paper as there are 12 million taxpayers in Australia, which equates to, on the minimum, 24,000 reams of paper, 1440 trees and 130 tons of green house gases.

In today’s climate of being more aware of our usage, and our waste, why is the Australian Taxation Office not only doing the contrary to public sentiment but to their own Environmental Policy.

Western Digital WD TV Live

I have always wanted to add a Media Player to my entertainment system. It all started when I bought the Samsung Blu-ray, which enabled me to plug in a USB with a media file to be played via the Blu-ray.

Having seen media players before and knowing how they work it was the prompt that was needed to start my investigations. I recently upgraded my AV Receiver to enable the use of HDMI for inputs and outputs and was keen to get a media player that had HDMI incorporated.

My purchase is the Western Digital HD TV Live, this media player displays photo’s on the TV, playback music and video files, it also has the ability to connect to the internet. The internet function wasn’t something I was looking for, but at the place of purchase the internet enabled player was on special and was substantially cheaper than the non internet version.

The media player needs of course, storage. An one terabyte external hard is connected via a USB, the WD TV live has 2 USB’s so there will be no need to worry about space. I don’t use any compression on the movie files as I prefer quality to saving space, the average movie uses about 5 GB of space, so on a terabyte HDD that is about 200 movies. If I need more space then 2 & 4 TB external hard drives are an option.

The software that I use to back up my DVD’s to the hard drive are DVD Decrypter to take it from the DVD and store in a folder on the hard drive as DVD (vob) files. Then I use Avidemux to take the multiple DVD (vob) files and make a single mpeg file. I prefer not to have any compression so the quality of the movie remains the same, Avidemux performs this task well.

I have watched both hi definition and standard definition movies via the WD TV Live and am pleased with the sound and picture quality.