A recent straw poll on SMSF Adviser indicated that out of a total of 358 respondents, 273 or 76 per cent did not feel their firm was ready for the events-based reporting requirements.
Only around 24 per cent of respondents in the poll felt their firm was equipped for the new requirements.
SMSF Academy director Aaron Dunn said the ATO is currently advising that functionality for transfer balance account reporting, including paper forms and bulk data exchange transfer for APRA funds, will be available from 1 October 2017.
While there will be a transitional period for SMSFs, which means they generally won’t be required to commence transfer balance account reporting (TBAR) until 1 July 2018, Mr Dunn said he would recommend commencing events-based reporting before this.
“There’s not going to be any obligation this year to have to report amounts in respect to transactions or events that have occurred in the current year, until 1 July 2018,” he said.
However, the TBAR reporting will be available for SMSFs if they wish to commence this TBAR reporting before 1 July 2018, he explained.
“So once we have the functionality available, if you want to do it as part of completing the year-end financial statements, once this information has been rolled out, I would probably recommend doing so,” he said.
“If you leave everything right up until the first of July, you will have a significant amount of paperwork that is going to need to be completed, because you’ve taken advantage of the entire transitional period.”
Mapping out how events-based reporting will be implemented for clients will therefore be critically important, he said.
It would be really good if we were able to commence events-base reporting. Already we will have to backtrack to 1/7/17, and the longer we wait for the mechanism to be in place to enable us to report, the more onerous the task will be