New ATO Penalty Regime

Stephen Harvey, current as of: 20 October 2014.

The ATO has recently been handed new powers to ensure that SMSF trustees comply with their duties and obligations. These commence from 1 July 2014 and you can view a detailed summary of the changes here.

Under the new regime, where a SMSF has individual trustees, the ATO will impose any penalty on each individual trustee, meaning the penalty will be multiplied by the number of trustees. Corporate trustees, however, will incur only 1 penalty.

While many professional advisers already recommend that their clients use corporate

SMSF trustees (for various reasons, summarised here), given these changes, all SMSFs with individual trustees, and those establishing new funds, should now consider the appointment of a trustee company to avoid the possibility of multiplying these substantial penalties.

What should I do now?

For existing SMSFs with individual trustees, Acis now offers a special low-fee package to register a new trustee company and prepare the documents necessary to appoint that company and remove the existing trustees.

As our fee is volume-dependent, for a quote, please email acis@acis.net.au with an indication of the number of your clients’ funds that might benefit from this service.

STOP PRESS: For orders received by 30 November 2014, we will also include a complimentary SMSF deed update, so that each fund will then operate with our latest Governing Rules.

If you would like further information or have any questions, please contact us on 1800 773 477 or email acis@acis.net.au.