“They’re currently undergoing their business-to-business testing phase, and as part of that, they are testing with one APRA fund and then one other SMSF messaging provider. They are well through with that test,” said Mr Morgan.

“Once that is complete, they will conduct some internal readiness activities, make sure that all systems are ready to go, and then they’ll be going live.”

Mr Morgan also ruled out the ATO ever becoming an electronic service address (ESA) provider following a number of inquiries from the SMSF industry.

“It’s not something that the ATO is set up for. If that was something we did develop, it would have to be built from the ground up,” he explained.

“There are already existing commercial operations around and they have the infrastructure and the relationships with the SMSF sector. If the ATO did develop their own ESA for rollovers, then we would be in direct commercial competition with these other operations.”

Mr Morgan also stressed the importance of SMSF trustees keeping their ESA records with the ATO up to date.

“If we’ve got the wrong ESA provider on record, that can cause significant problems for the SMSF as they’ll be unable to release the money. We’ll try to send out the release authority to the ESA provider we have on record, but if the SMSF is not a client with them, then they’ll send it back to us and they’ll reject it,” he said.

“You won’t be able to release the money from the SMSF then because we’ll mark them off as an unviable destination. It can also cause significant problems with rollovers because the verification checks of transferring funds may fail as well if our records are out of date.”