Real-time reporting for SMSFs is likely to be introduced in May or June next year, but should not be overly onerous for the majority of trustees, a technical expert in the industry has said.
Commenting on recent discussions between the SMSF Association and the ATO, association head of technical Peter Hogan said: “I suggested a single start date for everyone and that was fairly enthusiastically taken up by most of the ATO people in the room.
“Whether that’s 15 May next year or probably more sensibly 1 July 2018 I would have thought, but it might be earlier than that, it’s not ultimately my decision in the end.”
Hogan noted the initial real-time reporting requirements would only cover transfer balance account debit and credit transactions, with trustees having to report 10 days after the month in which the relevant transaction occurs.
Pension events would receive more lenient treatment with the reporting requirement to be 28 days after the quarter in which the pension commences “to give people time to appropriately value assets and so on”, he added.
While the obligation of real-time reporting may not begin until May 2018, he said SMSF trustees needed to be mindful of transactions occurring between 1 July 2017, when the reporting regime starts, and this date.
“Be conscious you’ll need to have [these transactions] valued because when the first reportable transaction does happen, you’ll then have to backfill the reportable history back to 1 July 2017 at that point in time,” Hogan warned.
However, from a broader perspective he did not believe too many trustees would experience a noticeable administrative burden once the new reporting regime was implemented.
“For a lot of self-managed super funds if there’re two members, there will be two reportable events: when they start an income stream and that’ll be it for the two members, and then they won’t really have to report on anything else because they’ll just run the pension until someone dies and then that’ll become a reportable event,” Hogan noted.
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