When you need to deal with the Commissioner’s officers you would be well advised to know something about them. In this paper, Martin Keating explores the formal guidelines within which they work, but also relate, with the assistance of some anonymised anecdotes, his first hand observations of some individual attitudes and group dynamics that officers commonly display. Against this background Martin then goes on to make some suggestions about how practitioners might best deal with tax officers on a case by case basis, finishing with a few comments abou thow representative bodies like The Tax Institute can fine tune their representations regarding perceptions of the ATO’s shortcomings in these regards.