Speaking at the SMSF Association National Conference, ATO assistant commissioner Kasey Macfarlane said whilst SMSFs are not required to report anything sooner than 1 July 2018 under the new reporting arrangements, approximately 900 SMSFs of their own volition have began reporting earlier for some 1,200 members.
“To date we have issued around 20 excess transfer balance determinations to SMSF members,” said Ms Macfarlane.
“At least two of those have happened because of the mismatch in reporting between SMSFs and APRA funds.”
Due to the different reporting timeframes between SMSFs and APRA-regulated funds, who report more regularly, members in some cases are ending up with a double credit being reported for their transfer balance account.
“So what’s happened is an SMSF member rolled over an amount to an APRA fund and started an income stream over there. The APRA fund has already reported the credit to us, but the SMSF hasn’t reported the corresponding debit. So based on our records it looks like they already exceeded the cap but that’s actually not the case,” she said.
Based on ATO data, of the 1.1 million SMSFs members, 400,000 of them also have an interest in an APRA regulated fund, she said.
“So when we’re talking about caps and limits that are applied across the totality of someone’s superannuation holdings, it’s going to be important that they have that visibility across the board,” she said.
We’ve received one and 3 weeks later we received a letter saying that the ATO made a mistake. What a way to confuse people.
This the tip of the iceberg. My Clients have just received two incorrect determinations due to the delay in the ato processing the SMSF tbar reports lodged within two weeks of the APRA fund reporting the transactions. Answers from the tax office were “yes we have received your SMSF reports but it will take more than 28 days to process them into our system and will all wash out in the end !!!!” In the mean time the myGov site is declaring the excess over the cap and the determination letters are threatening that the APRA fund will be instructed to commute the excess despite the fact that it is completely incorrect.
It was obvious from the outset that these timing and source differences would cause false determinations and a paperwork merry go around wasting time for everybody.
“At least 2 (of around 20) … happened because of the mismatch”. Therefore, significantly more occurring for other reasons such as inadequate systems in place. A client received excess balance determination and when ATO contacted, they were unable to identify whether reported figures were credits or debits against the total balance. Ensure you have all your facts and figures ready to guide them through
Could you please not start sentences with ‘so’. It is both annoying and bad grammar.