Let’s be honest, none of us are fans of paing taxes, but imagine you found out your business hadn’t paid taxes in such a long period of time, that it accumulated a bill over a million dollars?
This was the reality for Tim Duggan, the co-founder of Junkee Media, having found out the people who worked in the company’s finance hadn’t been paying the tax bills.
In this episode of The Weekend Briefing, Duggan joins Tom Tilley to recount how he found out about the debt and how he addressed it.
Listen now:
Duggan said Junkee Medi was at its “peak of rising”, receiving a lot of attenton and had locked in a lot of money and advertisers before realising what had happened.
“We had an internal issue where one of our people who worked in finance didn’t pay our tax bill and didn’t tell us and then left the company,” he said.
“One day, I checked the bank account in the morning and there was something like $60,000 less in there, and I was like, what is this? And it said ATO.
“I called up the ATO and they said we’ve done a garnishee order, and a garnishee order is if you don’t pay your tax bills, the ATO can go into your bank account and if you have the money there, they just take it.
“It turns out that we hadn’t paid our tax bills for a very long period of time and we had not realised this. We assumed finance people were doing it, and we had a million dollars plus tax bill.
Duggan, the author of a number of books, the latest being Work Backwards, also talks about what he did with the freedom to choose his work, after selling Junkee for around 15 million dollars.
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