yes, i used to study this.
heres my take. DONT DO IT. heres what happens, they send you a box with a bunch of large folders, and you read it. you will get around 5 audio conferences per subject which i found to be useless, you basically show up to an ATO office, sit there with other people, and hear a guy talk over a conference machine talking about the material, it goes for around 1 hour, you wont learn much. especially when you study microeconomics and he is explaining graphs.
the regional classes only happen around once a semester per subject and they honeslty dont help that much.
the subject itself is very boring. sure you can study accounting and economics here and there but there is way to much taxation, and anybody who's studied tax law in a comm/bus degree would know, there is large ammounts of reading.
the main source of your learning is from the notes they send you. so you will be required to study on your own, reading through way to many pages every week, and trust me, you have to be EXTREMELY motivated to get through it. think about it, theres no compulsory lectures/tutorials, nothing, you study at home, every normal person will fall behind and thats where the trouble starts. its incredibly difficult given the boring nature of tax. i was lured into doing this degree because i thought distance ed will give me more time and flexibility, that was true, but keeping up with the content was hard, the subject demanded to much and was boring.
summary, only do this shit if you have a real keen interest in taxation and that you are the motivated kind, really motivated, remember the content is very boring and you have to sit there on your own and read hundreds of pages of it. theres nothing stopping you from getting up and just going out and have some fun. adding to that i found the lecturers help to be quite poor, asking questions on webct would have a response time for 3-4 days, and often undetailed rushed answers. if you want to become an accountant/tax agent, do it through a commerce/business degree.
i wish someone had told me this before, would have saved me alot of time and trouble.
