Leigh Mansell, director of technical and education services at Heffron, has said in a post-budget webinar that money has been set aside to continue the stabilisition of Australia’s business registers, including linking director IDs to the asset company register.
“The government always intended to proceed to this next phase, we just didn’t have any idea of when they were going to do that, but money has been set aside, which will be great because we’ve been collecting all these director IDs but have had nowhere to link them,” she said.
“That information wasn’t being used anywhere. ASIC knew whether you had one or not, but they weren’t linking it to the particular company, or companies, that you happen to be a director of, so the benefits of having director IDs hadn’t been realised yet.”
Mansell said the government also announced in the budget that it was going to strengthen the sanctions that are available to the Tax Practitioner Board for tax agents doing the wrong thing.
“They’re also going to modernise the registration framework for tax practitioners, and they’re going to provide some funding to target high-risk tax practitioners,” she said.
“This is all further government responses to the PwC matter. I think many tax practitioners are probably pretty weary of the various changes that have been made – the breach reporting requirements, the changes to the code of conduct. The last six to nine months have seen a plethora of changes impacting tax agents and when I first saw that they were making further changes to the tax practitioners’ regime, I was a little bit worried.”
However, she continued that after having looked at the details contained in the budget she is hopeful these are positive changes.
“The budget papers do talk about the fact that they are going to consult with industry and we hope that consultation is more than just in name this time around, and we get something that is a positive thing for the industry, rather than further red tape for everybody.”
Mansell said the government has also committed to providing additional funding to the ATO to strengthen the fairness, and sustainability of the tax system.
“There were a number of key areas that they were targeting. They weren’t targeting superannuation in particular but were talking about the tax obligations of medium to large businesses.”
“However, they were also looking at the superannuation contribution obligations of those businesses, and called out that they expect that $31 million in unpaid super is expected to be dispersed to employees as a consequence of these new measures.”
She added that this is a relatively small amount in comparison with the $900 million that had previously been dispersed in the last financial year as a consequence of similar measures taken to identify businesses that weren’t paying superannuation for their employees.
