Real-time TBAR necessary for APRA fund rollovers
It is imperative that SMSF advisers report pension rollovers to APRA-regulated funds as soon as the rollover occurs to avoid double counting, due to the time lag between SMSF and APRA fund reporting requirements, according to SMSF Alliance.
The SMSF administrator’s principal, David Busoli, said while the sector had rightly been granted concessions from real-time reporting when the transfer balance account was introduced, SMSF professionals needed to ensure they took the extra step to report pension rollovers immediately in this case to avoid a TBA breach notice.
“Where you have a pension flowing from an SMSF to an APRA fund, you’ve got to report straight away, and it’s not hard to do because when you do the documents for the rollover you have to bring your accounts up to date anyhow, so it’s not a huge jump from there to the TBAR,” Mr Busoli told SMSF Adviser.
“APRA funds always report straight away. So, if you’ve got funds coming from an APRA fund to an SMSF and the fund says the pension’s been commuted, it’s not a problem, but if it’s the other way around, you are going to get double counting.”
Despite industry speculation around an eventual move to real-time reporting for SMSFs, Mr Busoli said this was unlikely in the short term as the technology in the sector was not currently set up for it.
“The SMSF sector isn’t physically capable of real-time reporting across the board for every TBAR,” he said.
“In this case, we are talking about specific ones you can make an exception for, so it’s not a huge additional workload on the accountant. But as we go towards more electronic efficiencies, we need to bear in mind that, yes, [real-time reporting] is going to be more possible, but the biggest impediment we have is the lack of information sharing from the Tax Office.”
Mr Busoli added that until the ATO moved to make their data accessible to SMSF software providers — which it has previously flagged as a future priority — TBA errors among the SMSF population were likely to increase.
“There is going to be a huge number of wrong TBAs because we’ve already found a significant number of breach notices since the TBA started up. Think about how many other problems haven’t come to light because they haven’t resulted in a breach,” he said.
“The ATO has said they have been lenient with TBA breaches so far, but they are going to become more aggressive, but you can’t become more aggressive until you’ve given us the relevant information to find out what we need to be doing.”
