Aptum Legal

Commercial & Tax Disputes

Practice Lead (Tax Disputes)

Michael has an extensive career in technical taxation policy and complex dispute resolution. For 11 years prior to joining Aptum, Michael worked for the ATO and Commonwealth Treasury, holding a range of senior positions including Acting Assistant Commissioner of the ATO.

In recent years Michael has been instrumental in steering the ATO’s post COVID-19 debt recovery strategy, leading and training a team of debt recovery specialists responsible for the ATO’s most strategic cases, both domestically and internationally. Combined with an understanding of the political, legislative and risk factors that influence the ATO’s decision making through his experience as a policy director, Michael has unique insights into the ATO’s latest recovery approach.

Michael believes in collaboration as a highly commercial and often undervalued approach to resolving disputes. Relying on his expertise with small and medium enterprises, Michael played a key role in establishing the Small Business Taxation Division of the AAT, a platform which systemically simplified and made more accessible the process for resolving tax disputes. Michael equally applies this philosophy on a case-by-case basis, having seen how commonly disputes can be stalled by confrontational tactics and perceived differences in values, and how stripping away these things leave bare the issues that lead to resolution. Michael’s career is hallmarked by bringing together stakeholders with wildly different interests to reach commercial outcomes with the ATO.

Michael’s interest in demystifying barriers to resolving disputes extends to his care for developing legal teams in ways that help clients meaningfully engage with the law – with humanness in communication a starting point for considerate, outcome-focused relationships.

English

Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice, The Australian National University (2014) Bachelors of Laws (LLB), Monash University (2012)