Do you expect the Labor government to push through any further super-related changes that could hurt SMSFs in the year ahead?
Grant Abbott, LightYear Group chair, director, and founder
You can see with the QAR and the new “qualified adviser”, we can give free advice excluding accountants and that will have quite a significant impact on the industry. It’s not good for financial planners, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
The big move is making sure estate planning trust deeds and documentation are correct and I believe will see a lot of cases around this for SMSFs in 2024. There were a couple of court decisions around this already which reaffirmed the fact that a binding death benefit nomination doesn’t have to abide by the SIS Act, but surprisingly I still see several deeds that are still under the three-year lapsing arrangement.
We may also end up going back to the old days when excess franking credits were non-refundable, and they are going to be limited to the amount of tax payable.
Meg Heffron, director Heffron
It really will be interesting to see where we end up on the reforms around advice. SMSFs are unique in that a lot of the advice provided in terms of strategy is very tax or legislative-based. There is a place in there for high-quality accountants who are genuine SMSF specialists and have no desire to get into the broader advice business. I would love to see us land on sensible settings that allow them to play their part.
Fatuma Akalo, financial adviser at Wattle Partners
A renewed attack on income and franking credits would not surprise me.
Michael Hallinan, special counsel, SUPERCentral
I think the retirement phase reforms arising from the implementation of the Retirement Phase of Superannuation Discussion Paper could be used to justify the exclusion of SMSFs from the provision of retirement incomes. This could be done expressly by simply removing the ability to issue account-based income streams or implicitly by imposing pooling or longevity requirements for income streams such that SMSFs cannot satisfy for either scale or regulatory reasons.
