SMSF practitioners told to take action on valuations
With the commencement of the new financial year, SMSF practitioners have been urged to start obtaining correct valuations for assets in order to prepare clients for their CGT relief application.
Perpetual Private head of strategic advice Colin Lewis says in the lead-up to 30 June, there’s been a lot of focus on what needed to be done, such as organising commutation requests, in order for SMSF trustees to be eligible for the CGT relief.
“Now the actual work side of it has to be done. While the CGT relief [schedule] is included with the return for the fund, now that we’re past 30 June, SMSF practitioners and trustees should be starting to get valuations for assets,” Mr Lewis told SMSF Adviser.
While the process for obtaining valuations for assets such as shares is relatively straightforward, obtaining valuations for more unique assets, such as managed funds and real property, will be more complex, he said.
“Most people created a generic sort of statement to commute the pension down to $1.6 million, but they didn’t know what the exact amount was for the partial commutation because they didn’t have exact values as of 30 June 2017,” Mr Lewis said.
“Now it’s a matter of tidying up what the actual commutation values are to really hit that $1.6 million cap.”
For clients with defined benefit income streams, most of the defined benefit funds should have now written to their members advising what their pension payments or income stream payments will be from 1 July.
“We need to convert that into what the special value is for the purposes of testing it against the transfer balance cap,” Mr Lewis said.
Miranda Brownlee
Miranda Brownlee is the deputy editor of SMSF Adviser, which is the leading source of news, strategy and educational content for professionals working in the SMSF sector.
Since joining the team in 2014, Miranda has been responsible for breaking some of the biggest superannuation stories in Australia, and has reported extensively on technical strategy and legislative updates.
Miranda also has broad business and financial services reporting experience, having written for titles including Investor Daily, ifa and Accountants Daily.
