The Australian Taxation Office is preparing contingency plans in case business conditions deteriorate but says surprisingly few firms have so far flagged interest in tax relief.

It comes after Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced in April the ATO would provide temporary relief to small businesses unable to meet their tax obligations after costs spiked because of the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

ATO relief could include “more generous payment plans, remission of interest and penalties, and also support in various PAYG instalments where there’s been a downturn in taxable income”, Dr Chalmers said in April.

“They’ll also limit compliance actions across the worst-affected industries, and some debt collection actions may be paused where that’s appropriate,” he said.

Speaking at the Australian Shareholders’ Association conference, ATO second commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn said the number of businesses that had registered interest in tax concessions through the agency’s website was “in the thousands”.

“The short answer is no, not really,” Mr Hirschhorn said, when asked whether the ATO was seeing many requests come through.

“If you consider there’s about four million small businesses in Australia, depending on how you cut it, we’re talking well less than tens of thousands.”

Mr Hirschhorn said the ATO was operating under stage two of the government’s four-stage response to the international fuel crisis.

Stage two means fuel supply is still broadly sufficient despite localised disruptions.

For the tax office, that meant an expansion of its normal administrative concessions rather than the kind of large-scale support rolled out during COVID.

“We’re very experienced in administrative concessions around bushfires and floods,” he said.

But Mr Hirschhorn said one lesson from the pandemic was that support needed to be carefully calibrated.

“Sometimes being excessively kind is actually cruel in the longer term,” he said, warning that overly generous cashflow relief could leave some businesses trapped by “getting out of the discipline of paying tax”.

That concern has been backed by NSW Treasury research, which found pandemic-era support kept some businesses alive that may otherwise have failed.

The 2025 paper found WA had the highest employment exposure to so-called “zombie businesses” in a state comparison, with mining and agriculture among the sectors most affected.

But with the oil price still above $US100 a barrel and talks of the conflict unresolved, Mr Hirschhorn said the government may well turn to the ATO to deliver business concessions.

He said that was likely still “well down the path”, but the tax office was ready to “dust off” the systems and institutional knowledge built during the pandemic.

“We know businesses; we touch businesses,” he said.

That included programs such as JobKeeper and the cashflow boost, which Mr Hirschhorn said injected about $40 billion into small businesses.

“People forget cashflow boost,” he said. “It was completely seamless through companies’ BAS returns. And nobody really remembers it.”

For the time being, businesses can still turn to the ATO website for concessions.

“The other thing we learned from COVID was that it’s good to have a button on your website that somebody can click and say, ‘I’m interested in a concession’,” Mr Hirschhorn said.