Lyn Formica, head of education and content at Heffron, said that following last year’s crackdown on incorrect market valuations in SMSFs, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) found that not all auditors were heeding the call to up the ante in terms of how often new asset valuations are required.
“In March last year, the ATO did a bit of a campaign in relation to market valuations of assets. They identified about 16,000 self-managed superannuation funds that had reported the same value for assets like property and unlisted trust for three consecutive years,” Formica said.
“That was just a driver, or a red flag, for the ATO to think, ‘hang on a minute. Are these people actually really revaluing their assets to market or not?’ There were 1,000 auditors involved and 16,000 SMSFs. The ATO contacted the auditors, and were actually focusing on what auditors were doing, rather than focusing on the trustees.”
Formica continued that at the time, the ATO did let trustees know that the ATO was concerned about their compliance from the perspective of things such as paying the correct minimum pension.
“The ATO went back and reviewed the subsequent annual returns for those self-managed superannuation funds. Of those 16,000 funds, the next time they lodged an annual return, the ATO reviewed them and identified that 80 per cent of those particular funds had, in fact, updated their property valuations in the next return, but only 48 per cent had updated their unlisted trust valuations,” she said.
“The ATO then commenced a review of the auditors where those valuations had not been updated and an auditor contravention report had not been lodged. It then asked auditors what evidence they used to verify the market value of that asset, or verify what the market value of that asset was, and what evidence they asked for from the trustees. And in all of the finalised cases to date, none of those auditors had obtained sufficient evidence to satisfy the ATO that they had done the right thing.”
She continued that the ATO subsequently found that those particular auditors were still using incorrect and outdated practices and were still only obtaining valuations every three years.
“They were not seeking, for example, objective data to substantiate the asset valuation for assets within an unlisted unit trust. They weren’t looking through the trust and working out what those assets were then worth,” Formica said.
“I’m sure most auditors are doing the right thing and not falling into this category, but if you’re an accountant and have SMSFs that are being audited by someone else, you may find that they are now stepping up the game yet again in relation to what they’re asking for in terms of valuation of assets.
“If you are getting requests for further information, more regular information, it is all as a consequence of the action that the ATO is taking to try and stamp out the bad behaviour of auditors for not seeking enough evidence to justify valuations of assets.”
Lyn
In my opinion if the ATO starts auditing SMSF’s who have invested in related trusts – there will be a lot more than 160,000 Trustees potentially be subject to Dive 296 Tax – and the best part is that ATO knows that – as they can easily find which related trust owns which property and which SMSF owns which trust – game over !
Hey ATO, guess what? If Div 296 gets up it will be a whole lot worse and eventually there won’t be any SMSF auditors after you rub them all out or they quit because it will be all too hard.
The Commissioner of Taxation should be protesting against taxing unrealised capital gains in Div 296 as well.