Super software veteran ups ATO systems fight
BGL’s head Ron Lesh is ramping up his fight to have the ATO’s digital systems stabilised, as other superannuation professionals express concerns about the rollout of the proposed real-time reporting for SMSFs.
Mr Lesh will be reaching out to Minister for Revenue and Financial Services Kelly O’Dwyer in an effort to raise awareness about the frustration and productivity loss for tax and superannuation professionals who have to constantly deal with the ATO’s portal outages.
It follows another unplanned outage this week to several portals including the tax, business and BAS agent portals.
Mr Lesh said ASIC’s digital systems have been particularly unreliable of late, with simple debt reports taking several hours longer than anticipated.
The ATO earlier announced its plans for real-time reporting in the SMSF sector, with rollout beginning this financial year and extending into FY18-19.
“They can’t get the system stable to do the regular reporting, let alone the new reporting that they want to do,” Mr Lesh said.
He added that given the time frame, the ATO should be able to roll this out effectively for the SMSF sector.
Meanwhile, Verante Financial Planning’s director Liam Shorte told SMSF Adviser that he is concerned about how the SMSF sector is going to meet the ATO’s data expectations.
“I do believe that the ATO should be able to provide the data that they have on file in the proposed real-time reporting regime, but my concern is that suburban SMSF administrators, which includes my own referral partners, with annual services to their clients will not be able to meet the ATO’s data needs,” Mr Liam said.
“When you consider that just this year the ATO had to extend the lodgement deadline to 30/06/2017 for SMSFs, then how can you expect real-time reporting if 30 June 2017 balances aren’t available 12 months later?”
