On Tuesday the ATO told industry representatives, including Chartered Accountants ANZ, about arrangements for SMSF TBA event based reporting.

As has been previously reported there will be two different reporting regimes for SMSFs.

One that requires annual reporting that must be completed by the time a fund is required to lodge its annual return. This will apply to funds that have no member with a Total Super Balance of at least $1m.

The other reporting stream (which will apply to a SMSF if it has at least one member with a TSB of at least $1m) will require TBA events to be reported within 28 days after the end of the quarter in which an event occurred.

The $1m TSB rule will apply even if a member with more than that in total super monies is not receiving a pension and has less than $1m in their SMSF.

The $1m TSB test will be determined on the 30 June in the financial year before a SMSF has to first report a TBA event. Once this test has been done a fund will fit into its reporting regime going forward.

This means that for funds with pensions payable in the 2017 financial year, the Total Super Balance will be determined on 30 June 2017.

At this point in time there are no plans to index the $1 million TSB threshold. The ATO plan to monitor the operation of these TBA reporting rules for SMSFs and will make adjustments as required.

The ATO can apply penalties if TBA events are not reported in time – for example, this might occur because a fund administrator assumes that a fund falls into the annual reporting requirement when in reality it should have been reporting quarterly – however initially it will be endeavouring to help the SMSF industry to comply with these new reporting requirements.

We are happy to answer any questions members might have about TBA event based reporting. We will also continue to provide more details as they come to hand.