Is your business prepared for Single Touch Payroll?

Single Touch Payroll is a government initiative to streamline business reporting obligations, which is due to become compulsory from 1 July 2018. When a business pays its employees, the payroll information will be sent to the ATO via the business’s payroll software.

Reporting under the Single Touch Payroll (STP) system removes the requirement to issue payment summaries, provide annual reports and tax file number declarations to the ATO. During the first year of its introduction, the ATO says employers will not be liable for a penalty for a late STP report. […]

It seems that the ATO will be taking a dim view (or dimmer, this year) of the abuse of work related expense claims for individual taxpayers. The total value of such claims rose to a record $21.2 billion in 2017, and reports contend that the ATO is concerned about over-claiming and even outright fraud.

ATO advice for taxpayers, before including claims for work related expenses at the label for “other” work related expenses for 2018 tax time, should consider making sure they can show:

they spent the money themselves and were not reimbursed
the expense was directly related to earning their income
they have a record to prove it.

The push on work related expenses (WREs) comes on the back of the release by the government of a House of Representative Economics Committee’s report on its inquiry into tax deductibility. […]

Rental property investors can claim capital works deductions for construction costs for a rental property, however there are limits imposed in relation to the dates such works were completed. The deductions are only available on residential properties if these were built after 17 July 1985. Generally, up to 15 September 1987 the rate is 4% a year (over 25 years) and after then is 2.5% (but over 40 years).

Residential property investors seeking capital works deductions need to remember that you can only make a claim for periods when the rental property was used for income producing purposes, not when used for private purposes.

Subsequent purchasers of a property can claim for the balance of the period, because unlike a depreciating asset there is no balancing adjustment on disposal of the property, unless the building is destroyed. The balance of any claim is passed on, on the same basis, to any later owners. […]

Small business CGT concession eligibility to tighten
The government announced last year that it intended to tighten the eligibility factors for the CGT concessions that are generally available to small businesses. The CGT concessions are important for qualifying businesses in that they can defer, reduce or remove liability to CGT.

Specifically, the proposed amendments (which have been released in exposure draft form) will limit the current CGT concessions to assets that are used by a small business or ownership interests in a small business. […]

Community complaints prompt Inspector-General of Taxation to review PAYG instalments

The Inspector-General of Taxation, Ali Noroozi, has just released his review into aspects of the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) instalments system that have come to be viewed as less-than-helpful by many participants and associated stakeholders.

The IGT’s review into the PAYG instalments system was conducted largely in response to feedback drawn from the IGT’s complaint handling service since May 2015. It says it has taken this amount of time to get sufficient complaint investigation data on which to act, but that it is the first such review undertaken in direct response to taxpayer complaints.

Subsequent IGT consultation also drew on input from tax practitioners, their representative bodies and also individual taxpayers who had experienced directly the aspects of the PAYG instalment system that were of concern.

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As a tax concept, “entertainment” can be relevant not only to fringe benefits tax (FBT), but also to income tax and even goods and services tax (GST). For a business, whether a business expense is “entertainment” will generally also determine whether the cost is deductible. If the expenditure can be shown to be directly connected with the carrying on of a business, it should be deductible.

The example of someone taking a client out to lunch can certainly be shown to be in connection with a business. However, there is still a lurking danger within the relevant sections of the tax law that says that if such an expense also represents “entertainment”, by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) view, then that cost can be taken out of the deductibility equation. In this article, we explore these ins and outs in some detail. […]

Square-peg expense won’t fit in a round-hole deduction? It could be a D15

Now and then you may be required to look around for a suitable item on your tax return to place an expense that simply doesn’t “fit” in the items reserved for other categories of expenses. These are known as “D15” deductions, and sits in the section of the supplementary tax return where claims can be made that do not fit neatly into the other deduction items that precede it. […]