Sean Johnston, SMSF specialist at Heffron, said on a recent podcast that data feeds do the “heavy lifting” in terms of keeping track records of valuations, balances, and payments for audit purposes.
“This is one of those cases where prevention is obviously better than cure. I can sit here and talk about how we fix this, what we can do in our software till the cows come home, but ultimately, what we want is to just not have failed pensions in the first place,“ Johnston said.
“It is significantly easier to get ahead of that, to review your pensions, to go out to clients and advisers and contact them and let them know they need to take a little bit more pension payment if you’ve got live, real-time data.”
Johnston continued that with the new regulations for ceasing and restarting pensions that have failed to meet minimum payments standards, relying on “shoebox accounts” will create challenges in regard to ensuring that compliance can be maintained.
“It gets really hard to work around things that don’t data feed, that will never data feed, such as property, but any visibility is better than none. So, if you can have all of your assets data feeding except the things that will never feed, that gives the auditor a significantly better jumping off point and lets them work around all of the other intricacies of those things that don’t feed with so much more confidence,” he said.
With the lag in capability of software around the new pension requirements, Johnston said it is important that, besides ensuring clients take their minimum payments, it is also vital that auditors and accountants can “jump in” very quickly after the end of the financial year.
“It is best practice jumping in that first couple of weeks of July and re-reviewing all of your minimum pensions, because the faster you can pick up that somebody has failed to meet their minimum pensions, the faster you can get around to doing all that stuff that you need to do, such as commuting and restarting the pension,” he said.
“[There will be] less damage on the exempt current pension income front, particularly if you’re the practitioner that’s on the hook for that. You want to minimise that damage as quickly as possible, so that turning around in July and re-reviewing all your pensions, if you can, is the absolute most crucial step after taking all of those preventative actions.”
When it comes to commuting a pension, Johnston said there are some ”interesting” steps in the middle that offer more flexibility as SMSF practitioners.
“That’s notionally where the payments, if any, that have been taken during the year are allocated and whether they are pension payments from that failed pension, or whether they’re pension payments to belong to another pension, lump sums from accumulation,” he said.
“None of that can be decided after the fact. We can, as practitioners, find out about it after the fact. Trustees quite often make decisions and don’t tell us about [them], but as practitioners, we shouldn’t be assuming the trustee’s intentions.
“We should be, in that middle phase, going back and clarifying whether the shortfall in minimum payments from one pension or multiple pensions, were they lump sums from accumulation? We can’t do anything retrospectively, so they have to have made those decisions beforehand, but they don’t have to have necessarily told you about the decision to do that before they did.”
