The TPB’s new debt and lodgement project will focus on tax agents with personal tax debts and no payment plans, and outstanding lodgements including of their income tax and SMSF annual returns.
About 2,700 practitioners who are trustees of their SMSFs currently have outstanding SMSF annual returns. Persistent lodgement failure could compromise trustee duties, which trustees agree to abide by on their initial fund declaration form.
“A person’s fitness and propriety to act as a tax agent… can have a knock-on impact on their fitness to act as a trustee,” said secretary and chief executive of the TPB, Michael O’Neill, who was appointed in August.
The program will be fully rolled out in February next year, and tax agents have until then to remedy their affairs. There is no amnesty period; rather, tax agents will be looked upon more favourably if they communicate and cooperate with the regulators.
On the radar
Tax agents with outstanding lodgement for the SMSFs have already been circled by the ATO in the last fortnight for compliance activity in 2019.
More broadly, late SMSF annual return lodgement has also been an ongoing area of focus for the ATO for several years, which has lowered the overall rate of non-lodgement.
In October last year, the tax office found that non-lodgement rates for the SMSF sector reached critical levels, with about 40,000 funds at risk of being made non-compliant.
Are tax agents really doing it so selflessly, or are they being paid for it?
No “S” Sherlock! With all the compliance, rule & software changes the past 2 years it is little wonder that some tax agents who have been selflessly helping others are behind. If the CPD is now 60 hours a year, you can only imagine that many agents ended up completing 120 hours for the raft of changes to give effect to 1/7/2017. Take a professional out of their practice for three weeks then of course they are going to be behind and it will take a lot longer to catch up now with the constant half-A’d changes being made which then require “fixes” and “patches”. Bit like agile programming. Deliver something quickly but spend 10 times as long fixing it because you didn’t do a very good job on the planning & implementation. Not condoned, but understandable. The ATO with all its resources still cannot produce TSB on the portal, has not been able to process commutation authorities, is closing its Clearing House for almost 3 weeks. Far more pervasive problems and much more heinous than 2700 non-lodgements!