New Australian Taxation Office (ATO) statistics show an increase in assets held in self managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) for the June 2008 quarter, to $358.3 billion in total.
While it seems there has been a significant jump in the assets held, a large part can be explained by the ATO's use of more recent tax return data from the 2006/07 tax year to compute the numbers.
"The March quarter number was based on 2005/06 data. These are estimates so whenever you change what you are estimating off, you will have some degree of change in the underlying figures," ATO assistant commissioner Stuart Forsyth said.
The new tax data saw the total estimated SMSF held assets at March 2008 to be $347.7 billion, as opposed to the previous figure published by the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority of $286.1 billion.
Regardless of the effect of the updated tax data, the level of assets held as at June reflected the effect of the Simpler Super regime, according to Forsyth.
"We always knew there was significant interest in the transitional measures and a heightened interest in SMSFs and superannuation generally, so we always expected some sort of movement," he said.
The number of SMSFs established during the June quarter was 10,623, up from 6795 in the preceding period.
The total number of SMSFs now stands at just under 388,000, servicing a total of 746,318 members.
