Graduate / AASSupporting Statements. How did you choose your proposed Course and Inst. M. Accounting ANU [4]

Hi all moderators and members,
I need your help to review my draft essay for Australia Award Scholarship
Thanks in advance for your input
Prompt:

How Did You Choose Your Proposed Course and Institution

Answer:

Having been working as a tax auditor at Directorate General of Tax (DGT) Ministry of Finance, I have observed that some areas in tax audit policy need amending. One of the main challenges for us when conducting an audit is unstructured financial statements of the taxpayers that makes tax auditor difficult to analyze it, even sometimes we need to re-entering or re-formatting data from taxpayers to make it a ready-to-analyze financial information. It costs us the most valuable resource which is time. On the other side, this problem also affects taxpayers in which they will be less productive because of consuming more time on administrative activities (re-entering data, filling forms) instead of focusing on their business. For this reason, I feel the need to continue my formal education to solve this issue with Australia Award Scholarship because I share Australia Award's vision of supporting human development for a productive society in Indonesia.

Australia would be the perfect study destination for me because The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) was the pioneer of implementation of Standard Business Reporting (SBR) to optimize financial and accounting information. SBR is a standard digital record-keeping using XBRL format that permits taxpayers to lodge automatically to various government agencies. It was reported that SBR transactions exceeded 15 millions with an estimated 1.2 billion AUD cost saving from using SBR in 2016.

After rigorous research on universities in Australia, I opt to study Master of Accounting at Australian National University because I can obtain a sound knowledge of XBRL and SBR on its subjects Accounting Information System and Corporate Financial Reporting respectively. It also offers courses such as Auditing and Assurance Services in which I can learn more about risk-based audit, and Taxation Law in which I can gain perspective on tax administration in Australia. Moreover, its proximity to the ATO Headquarters will allow me to interact and build connection with their experts. Those aforementioned skills combined will help me to reach my full potential to contribute to DGT, especially in assisting and making a modernized tax audit policy.