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INTRODUCTION

1 This electronic release contains estimates of the characteristics of wage and salary earners, including age, sex, occupation and income, for the year 2000-01 for the five major regions that form the Remoteness Structure classes within the Australian Standard Geographical Classification (ASGC).

2 These data have been compiled from the Australian Taxation Office's (ATO) Individual Income Tax Return Database and are part of the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) initiative to increase the availability of regional statistics, particularly through the use of administrative information collected by other government agencies.

3 The ABS wishes to acknowledge the support the Australian Taxation Office has provided in compiling these statistics and in assisting the ABS in its aim to increase the range of regional data available to users of regional statistics. With such support the wide range of statistics published by the ABS is enhanced.


CONFIDENTIALITY

4 All individual income tax statistics provided to the ABS by the ATO have been in aggregated form only, at the Statistical Local Area (SLA) level. Information about individual taxpayers have not been released to the ABS. Data for the five Remoteness classes have been derived from the aggregated SLA data.

5 In addition, the statistics, prior to being provided to the ABS, have been subjected to a confidentiality process that randomly adjusts cells in tables with small values. This includes altering some small cells to zero. Caution should therefore be exercised in deducing that there are no people in an area with certain characteristics and, in general, no reliance should be placed on cells with small values in tables. The application of this process prevents the risk of inadvertently releasing any information that may identify an individual while, for most purposes, the overall information value of the statistics have not been impaired.


SCOPE AND COVERAGE

6 The main functions and responsibilities of the Australian Taxation Office are to administer taxation legislation and to collect a wide variety of taxes. The ATO therefore collects data from its reporting population as part of its processes to calculate income tax liability for those persons who are required to lodge an income tax return.

7 The ATO database covers all individuals who submit an individual income tax return and includes persons with income from one or more of a range of sources such as wages and salary, own business, superannuation, investments and government pensions, benefits or allowances. However, the scope of the ATO statistics presented in this electronic publication relate only to persons with wage and salary income, i.e. wage and salary earners.

8 As the ATO's income tax return is designed to obtain a person's total income from various sources over a financial year, and not the employment status of a person at a particular point in time (as is the case in ABS collections), wage and salary earners have been defined as:

persons aged 15 years and over who have submitted an individual income tax return and for whom wage and salary income was the principal (or main) source of income for the financial year.

9 Wage and salary income, as reported on the income tax return, includes gross income as shown on the 'PAYG payment summary - individual non-business' as well as allowances, commissions, bonuses, tips, gratuities, consultation fees, honoraria and other payments for services. Allowances and other earnings may include car, travel or transport allowances, allowances for tools, clothing or laundry and dirt, risk, meal or entertainment allowances. The data to define and compile counts of wage and salary earners have been sourced from questions 1 and 2 on the 2000-01 individual income tax return. (Note: PAYG (Pay as You Go) payment summaries were previously known as Group Certificates).

10 Defining wage and salary earners in this way provides an indication of the main employment status, for the financial year, of persons submitting individual income tax returns and when combined with other characteristics of wage and salary earners included on the income tax return such as age, sex, occupation and income, valuable information about employees and employment activity in regions over time can be analysed.

11 The following diagram summarises the ABS categorisation of persons reporting wage and salary income on individual income tax returns lodged with the ATO. The shaded area represents wage and salary earners based on the ABS definition as specified above.

PERSONS LODGING INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX RETURNS, Australia, 2000-01



(a) Persons reporting wage and salary income may also have other sources of income.

• Major Cities of Australia
• Inner Regional Australia
• Outer Regional Australia
• Remote Australia
• Very Remote Australia
• Migratory

• minimises confidentiality restrictions as data are not output for postcodes with small populations;
• enables the data to be more easily compared with standard ABS output;
• enables the data to be output for other standard ABS geographic areas such as statistical divisions (SD), statistical subdivisions (SSD), local government areas (LGA), and in the case of the data presented here, Remoteness Structure classes; and
• provides flexibility so that data can be provided for the different regions of interest being studied by users of regional data (which are usually groupings of SLAs and/or LGAs).

• in applying the concordances it is assumed that the particular characteristics of any data item are uniformly distributed across a postcode and therefore concorded data may not truly reflect the distribution of the characteristics of the population.
• some official postcodes (e.g. PO boxes, etc.) do not correspond to residential areas but have still been reported under the current home address field. Data for these and other ‘invalid’ postcodes, such as those due to incorrect reporting or processing errors, have been included in an ‘unknown’ category for each state and territory and for Australia where the state or territory was not known.
• Data that could not be directly classified to one of the Remoteness Structure classes have been excluded from most tables. The effect of this is not significant as the population in the unknown category accounts for less than 0.6% of all persons.
• concorded figures have been rounded so discrepancies may occur between sums of the component items and totals.

ABS CATEGORIES OF EMPLOYED PERSONS(a), Australia, May quarter 2001


(a) Persons aged 15 years and over.
Source: ABS Labour Force Survey

NUMBER OF WAGE AND SALARY EARNERS, Very Remote Areas, 1995-96 to 2000-01	AVERAGE WAGE AND SALARY INCOME, by Remoteness Area, 1995-96 to 2000-01

• a number of low income earners, including wage and salary earners, are not required to submit a tax return and therefore may not be included in the statistics. For example, where income is below the annual tax free threshold and tax was not withheld, a return is not required to be submitted to the ATO. (Note: The tax free threshold was $5,400 for 1995-96 to 1999-00 and $6,000 for 2000-01);
• the data do not take account of whether wage and salary earners worked on a full-time or part-time basis, had overtime earnings or had multiple job holdings. Consequently, these factors may account for some of the differences when comparing average or median wage and salary incomes or other characteristics of wage and salary earners across regions. It should also be noted that the wage and salary data exclude persons in their own business (e.g. farmers), so do not represent total employment in a region;
• some persons may move address over the course of a year and consequently their wage and salary income may not all relate to the current home address or postcode area (and therefore the SLA/Remoteness area) as reported on the income tax return;
• generally, around 95.0% of individual income tax returns for any income tax year have been processed within one year and around 99% within two years of the end the income tax year. It may be possible that a very small proportion of returns had not been processed at the time that these statistics were compiled and therefore those records would not be included in the estimates presented. No attempt has been made to estimate or revise the data for any records submitted to the ATO after these statistics have been compiled. Note: Data for 2000-01 were compiled in August 2003, around twenty four months after the end of the 2001 income tax year.