Adam Roberts 
As part of the 2011-12 Federal Budget, the government announced the introduction of taxable payment reporting for businesses in the building and construction industry. The introduction of this reporting measure was aimed at improving compliance by contractors, particularly those not lodging all of their income on their income tax returns.
With the due date for lodgement of the 2015 Taxable Payment Report rapidly approaching (being 28 August), it is important to understand whether your business is firstly required to prepare such a report, and if so, the components necessary to complete this report.
Who Needs To Report?
The Taxable Payment Report is required to be completed by businesses:
- Primarily in the building and construction industry;
- Making payments to contractors for building and construction services; and
- That has an Australian Business Number (ABN).
You are considered to be a business that is primarily in the building and construction industry if any of the following apply:
- in the current financial year, 50% or more of your business activity relates to building and construction services;
- in the current financial year, 50% or more of your business income is derived from providing building and construction services;
- in the financial year immediately before the current financial year, 50% or more of your business income was derived from providing building and construction services.
What Needs To Be Reported?
Whilst a number of accounting software packages can now automatically produce the information necessary to complete this report, the information entered into these software packages is particularly important to ensure that the correct data is represented in the Taxable Payments Report. The report requires the following information to be disclosed for each contractor:
Simon Flowers 
The 2015 GBEA presentation night was held at the Arena on Thursday 20 August 2015. The night was extremely successful and all attendees made very positive comments in relation to the MC of Denis Walter and the new venue of the Arena.
There were 20 awards up for grabs by the entrants with the main Business of the Year award being won by S C Technology. This was an amazing win for Rob and Julie Hunter after winning the Commercial Service Medium business award earlier in the night and also being their first year as entrants into the awards. The independent judging panel felt they were an amazing business and unanimously voted for them to win the outright award.
It was also pleasing to see 2 small businesses being a finalist in the business of the year award being Embroidme and Great Ocean Road Surf Tours.
In relation to the LBW Chartered Accountants Large Business award , this was won by the Select Group.
The principals of LBW believe these awards are very positive for all businesses and would recommend that entry in the awards is a worthwhile experience. If you would like further information on the GBEA please contact Kelli Finlayson at the Geelong Chamber of Commerce.
Simon Flowers
At a recent CPA SMSF Conference the Acting Assistant Commissioner for Superannuation Kasey Macfarlane announced the ATO were targeting certain areas in relation to SMSF. These include:
- Dividend Stripping arrangements (TA 2015/1) – activities where taxpayers use SMSF to obtain refunds of imputation credits of private companies. These activities are usually contrived arrangements where the only purpose of the structure is for tax evasion reasons.
- Unexplained Valuation changes – where assets have been increased or decreased significantly from one year to another, the ATO will consider these funds to be high risk and may receive a questionnaire or audit form the ATO explaining the reasoning why certain assets increased or decreased significantly.
- Private/non arms length transactions – these are always on the target list for the ATO. Trustees must ensure transactions involving related parties must be done at arms length, otherwise there is a risk of getting taxed at 47%.
- Paying pensions – a greater proportion of super fund members are entering pension phase which means less tax payable by SMSF. The ATO have advised that pensions must be set up correctly following the trust deed and market values of assets are used on the commencement. They also remind people that the preservation age for members commencing pensions has increased to 56 years from 55 from 1 July 2015.
- Limited Recourse Borrowing Arrangements (“LRBA”) – The ATO have seen numerous LRBA not set up correctly. We are also seeing practically that many banks are not doing these anymore or restricting the type of assets that they will borrow against eg residential vrs commercial. It seems that the only LRBA that will work in the future will be self funded ones where banks are not involved – which incidently are the ones that the Government do not like.
- Low cost SMSF audits – the ATO will conduct reviews of those auditors who are chargeable small amounts for SMSF audits, as they do not believe they can conduct an audit for low cost.
- Superstream – has started for medium and large employers and will commence from 1 July 2016 for small employers.
If you require further information in relation to any of these items please contact Simon Flowers or Cathy Walley of our office.
