Privacy consultancy services

Standard Business Reporting (SBR) is a whole-of-government initiative to reduce the regulatory reporting burden for business that will initially target financial reporting from business to government. The project will work with industry to enhance software products already used by businesses to generate simplified forms that will be pre-filled from their accounts so they can be sent electronically to government.

SBR is being coordinated by The Treasury and will bring together the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Australian Taxation Office, and potentially State Revenue Offices, to streamline their business reporting needs. This project is being managed by the SBR Program within The Treasury and will:

a.make wording on forms consistent across agencies, so that businesses no longer have to guess what is being requested;

b.enable forms to be pre-filled as much as possible directly from information in a business’s accounting/record keeping software, eliminating hours of interpretation, recalculation and analysis; and

c.enable businesses to send reporting information electronically to the government via a single system that will automatically ensure it gets to the right agency.

A suitably professional and experienced consultant is required to ensure that all privacy risks that could or do arise in relation to SBR are identified and managed. The consultant will assist the SBR Program to develop a structure and strategy for actively managing or allocating privacy risks by conducting a detailed Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) in relation to the design, build and implementation of SBR Core Services. In addition, the consultant will advise about relevant trends in privacy thinking and provide ad hoc advice and guidance about privacy matters from time to time.

SBR Core Services will be a set of capabilities that, together, will deliver the integration consistency, availability, reliability and security necessary for businesses and their intermediaries to electronically interact with government via their accounting and financial software packages.