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.”
Where did it all go wrong?
30 years ago the visionary tax policy was “self assessment”. The assumption then and still now is that 99.9% of taxpayers are honest and will pay their dues.
So why oh why is the ATO obsessed with gathering data and measuring every blessed thing down to 4 decimal places, and costing the economy billions in compliance costs?
I guess because like most businesses in the last 30 years, the “propeller heads” infiltrated the ATO with their computers and started calling the shots.
If the original self assessment policy was adhered to, the ATO could sit back, with less than 20% of their current workforce, collect the money and just do audits.
What is the sense in spending billions to recover millions?
With 99.9% of taxpayers and their advisers observing the rules, the defaults would be minuscule compared to the current ridiculous and unsustainable levels of compliance.
I fear that over zealous public servants are regulating Australia into an economic disaster from which most of us in our lifetime, will never see a recovery.
Nailed it! The only way the incumbent government has created jobs is through compliance. If you look at the numbers, likely the sector with the biggest jobs growth is the government or NDIS funding which has seen unbelievable price gouging. A friend has a carer with her daily cost per week $9K Government funded. Go figure! The whole system needs to be turned on its head. Truly, a simpler solution: You can have as much in your SMSF as you want, but we are going to tax you at 30% for any earnings over three times the OAP pension limit (per member). Restore some equity into the system and make it much easier to administrate. All this online real-time reporting is total BS. The government are just pushing for technology and micro-managing our economy instead of getting the structural problems fixed.