Tax effect accounting vital in family law super splits

“Firstly, we’re asked to provide member balances, but being an SMSF, even though we process on a daily basis, often we have very large amounts that we don’t know what they are, the person has made a contribution or they bought something and they don’t have the evidence. The trustees have to cooperate to make sure that the accounts are brought up to date,” he said.

The next thing we need to consider is on what basis the member balance is going to be provided, said Mr Busoli.

“Generally speaking, SMSFs use cash accounting, but here, I believe we have to tick the box in the administration software and do tax effect accounting because we need to take into account in the member accounts unrealised gains,” he explained.

“There’s no point doing them without taking that into account, you’re going to get a skewed result, and generally, the person staying in the fund is the one that’s going to end up paying a lot of capital gains tax. So we have to do that.”

Mr Busoli said valuations would need to be determined for large lumpy assets that are manually valued, such as real estate, and have a current valuation that the parties are not going to argue over.

“Now, they are the trustees and should have provided us with that valuation, but they’re not necessarily both trustees, and in any case, there is a possibility that the member of the fund, particularly if the other one isn’t a trustee, might seek to use a valuation which is less than the market, so they’ve got to be happy in that respect,” he stated.

SMSF professionals will also need to find out who is staying in the fund and who’s going. Mr Busoli said that while both parties may decide to stay in the fund, this isn’t typically the case.

“Now, if you’ve got a remaining member in the fund whose account is going to be less than the amount that’s going to be necessary to hold a big lumpy asset that they also want to leave in the fund, you’ve got an issue,” he said.

“We need to be involved in the situation earlier on so that we can be part of the conversation to suggest to that maybe instead of running that line down the assets that each party holds, we make a bit more of an accommodation in the non-super assets and leave more of the super assets in there if we want to keep this particular property, for example, in there.”

Mr Busoli also noted that if there are children in the fund, then there may be other people leaving the fund as well.

“We have to make sure that the fund is still viable, maybe the fund needs to be wound up as well, maybe that’s part and parcel of this whole situation,” he said.