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These downloadable files, in Excel spreadsheet format, contain historical ATO PAYG Withholding Tax rates and HECS/HELP Repayment rates for specific years, formatted to help you determine Gross Wages from Net Wages amounts (a feature which is not present in the ATO's own publications).
There are two tables available for each financial year: one to use if you were paid weekly, and for jobs with fortnightly pay periods.
1) To use the tables, you will first need to decide, to the best of your recollection, on what basis PAYG Withholding would have been applied by that specific employer during the specific period for which you are reconstructing the payroll information.
What does this mean?
You will need to determine :
- Did the employer apply the Tax-Free Threshold or not?
(For most people the answer is "yes", unless they had 2 jobs and chose not to claim the Tax-Free Threshold on one of them). - If your job was full-time, did leave loading apply to the employment contract?
(Not all full time employees will have had leave loading applied, depending on their specific award, enterprise agreement, or contract. Annual leave loading is a bonus payment of 17.5% paid with your annual leave pay. The tax on this is deducted over the course of the year, rather than paying a larger amount of tax in the week(s) in which annual leave is actually paid). - Did you have a HECS/HELP debt at that time?
If you did have a HECS/HELP debt, did your employer know about it and actually deduct the extra tax?
(If you had a HECS/HELP debt at the time but you didn't notify your employer, they won't have deducted extra tax for HECS/HELP and you won't need to factor that in now. Double check though, if you can, because employers are normally notified that the employee has a HECS/HELP debt when your TFN Declaration is lodged at the commencement of employment; but if your HECS/HELP debt started after you started that job, then your employer will not have been notified unless you told them to update their records.)
2) Once you have determined the basis that PAYG Withholding was applied, you will need to find the corresponding green column. Read down that column until you find your net wages figure. (Please note that the set of green columns that are furthest to the right incorporate HECS/HELP repayments, whilst the far-left set of green columns do not incorporate HECS/HELP repayments).
3) Once you have found your net wages figure, read across that row from right to left — find the figure in the wages before tax column. This is the Gross Wages figure (the amount before tax was taken out), and this is what should have been reported to Centrelink at the time, and it's the amount that would have been used to calculate any reduction in your Centrelink payments. That's your number.
NOTE: There may be more than one Net Wages figure in the appropriate column that matches your net wages, and therefore more than one possible answer for Gross Wages. PAYG Withholding is levied on the nearest whole dollar amount by rounding down to the nearest whole dollar. Keep this in mind when deciding which figure is the most correct.
These tables may assist you in compiling evidence to appeal a robodebt #NotMyDebt
To help you organise this information, we have a Reverse Pay Slips Calculation Sheet Excel template, which you can download from the Tools & Templates - Other page of the Help! section.
