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Industry reaction to TBAR labelled as ‘overkill’
Parts of the SMSF industry have overreacted to events-based reporting with the requirements for the TBAR far less onerous compared with the old reasonable benefit limits regime, says an industry consultant.
Miller Super Solutions founder Tim Miller said unlike preparing a business activity statement, which requires all the incomings and outgoings for a quarter or instalment activity statement which requires a reconciliation of the income that has been paid for the quarter, transfer balance account reporting only requires a fund to report when certain events occur.
“Based on everything I've seen it doesn't come close to the onerous reporting obligations that existed under the RBL regime,” said Mr Miller.
Reporting under the RBL regime, he added, had to be completed on systems that didn’t have decent data feeds.
“You might have had transaction feeds where you had numbers coming through, but you then had to reconcile and work out exactly what they were,” said Mr Miller.
“If you look at what we had to do previously with RBLs, or even with PAYG reporting for the over 60s, it's far more onerous with regards to calculating tax, lodging activity statements and reconciliation statements and RBLs for lump sums and pensions and commutations.”
Mr Miller said he considers the time frames provided in option 1 of the ATO’s position paper on events-based reporting to be very reasonable.
“I can understand that any time something new comes along there's always a positive and negative reaction to it, but I think with some parts of the industry, the reaction has been a bit of an overkill,” said Mr Miller.
“[For] a lot of the older administration firms they previously did all this stuff so the reporting is not new, and I would suggest that this reporting requirement is a lot less than what we had to do before 2007.”
Miranda Brownlee
Miranda Brownlee is the deputy editor of SMSF Adviser, which is the leading source of news, strategy and educational content for professionals working in the SMSF sector.
Since joining the team in 2014, Miranda has been responsible for breaking some of the biggest superannuation stories in Australia, and has reported extensively on technical strategy and legislative updates.
Miranda also has broad business and financial services reporting experience, having written for titles including Investor Daily, ifa and Accountants Daily.
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