What do I do if my employees are telling me that they are not "tax ready"?

KB302

Overview

If an employee is not “Tax Ready” it means that Australian Tax Office has either not received the STP Finalisation and Lodgment data for that employee, or a change has been made to employee data after the last finalisation update.

Confirming successful STP submissions

The following reasons will affect whether the Tax Office grants an employee’s data as Tax Ready:

  1. STP submissions have not transmitted through to the AT
    1. Check SA4422 - STP Dashboard and make sure there are no submissions that are outstanding.
  2. Employee has not been “Finalised”
    1. Check the Pay Summary tab on the relevant employee file and confirm that a finalisation date is appearing in the STP finalisation date field.
  3. Additional payroll activity has occurred after your finalisation
    1. Check that you do not have any other payroll activity occurring on June 30th.
    2. If you do, you must ensure that the time of day of the STP finalisation submission is after the time recorded for any other STP submission on that day.

If payroll activity occurs on June 30th

Payroll activity occurring on June 30th can sometimes cause STP entries to un-finalise. To prevent this, STP entries must be created after the time of the last payroll update.

  1. Use SA4422 to confirm the time of last update occurring on June 30th.
  2. After this time, run SA4433 and clear the finalisation date for all current employees.
  3. Re-finalise the STP data, the employees should now be showing as “Tax Ready”.

Additional Notes

STP entries are sent to the ATO with a recorded date of June 30th regardless of the day they were processed. The time of the submission is then added, using the time of day that they were created. This can mean that the ATO considers payroll activity that occurs on June 30th to have occurred after STP finalisations, even if they occurred days afterwards, causing them to be un-finalised.

Did you find this article helpful?

If this article is missing information, ambiguous, or didn’t give you clear instructions, let us know and we will make it better! Please email us and quote the KB# in the top left of this article to let us know why it didn’t help you out and we will point you in the direction of additional information.

Last edit 28/07/25