On Friday 21. January 2022, the Institute of Actuaries of Australia released its submissions suggesting possible improvements to the ATO’s YourSuper Comparison Tool. The Institute said it supports the online Comparison Tool, but its key suggestions include: (i) splitting out investment and administration fees; (ii) initial ranking by net investment performance (not by fees); and…
THE TAX INSTITUTE posted its State of Policy Report: December 2021, on Friday 21.1.2022, noting – Keeping up to date with the latest developments in changing legislation can be a challenge at the best of times and may be especially hard if you’ve just returned from a well-deserved end of year break. Our State of Tax…
Here’s one that could have ‘slipped under the [tax] radar’. On 5 Dec 2021, the Department of Home Affairs issued a discussion paper called: Reform of Australia’s electronic surveillance framework., which calls for submissions from the public by 11 Feb 2022. This has relevance to tax in that there is a proposal that the ATO get…
On 14 Jan 2022, the Commissioner posted an article saying that McDonald’s Australia had been convicted and fined, that day, for failing to provide documents to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). This conviction seems to have something to do with the Mussalli decision, where prepayments of rent, to McDonalds were held to be on capital…
The NSW Court of Criminal Appeal has held that prosecuting authorities were able to use information obtained 12 years earlier, in an examination of an individual under s264 of the ITAA 1936, in the course of prosecuting the taxpayer for various dishonesty related offences. The s264 examination arose in the course of the Commissioner’s ‘Project Wickenby’…
The Government is seeking stakeholder views on exposure draft legislation that increases the rights of small businesses to contest the ATO’s collection of disputed tax debts in the AAT. In the 2021‑22 Budget the Government announced that it would extend the power of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) to pause or modify ATO debt recovery action…
In the beginning of December 2021, the Federal Court has ruled that certain assets of two undischarged bankrupts were not held in their self-managed super fund (SMSF) so that the assets were divisible among the creditors of their bankrupt estates. I note this is a long judgement (751 paragraphs) covering many issues. The facts were…
Late last year (24.12.21) the AAT agreed with the Commissioner, that a promotional makeup artist, who worked for a cosmetic company, as a contractor, was not carrying on a business, and was therefore not eligible to receive JobKeeper payments. This is another, in the flurry of JobKeeper cases, coming out late last month (Dec 2021). The…
The AAT has held that a plumber was an “employee” pursuant to the extended meaning of that term in s 12(3) of the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 (SGAA) for a person working under a contract – wholly or principally for labour. The facts were these. The taxpayer conducted a business selling and installing cooling and…
The AAT has confirmed that the value assigned by a taxpayer for the purposes of the pre-1 July 2000 margin scheme provisions was $22m as the taxpayer contended (not the $8.1m contended by the ATO) because it was the product of an “approved valuation” (which discounted from actual sales and costs figures, rather than projected…