The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) will be increasing its scrutiny of re-reporting in relation to superannuation contributions over the next 12 months.
The ATO’s concern about this activity has arisen from situations where individuals have re-reported their contributions almost immediately after being notified of a breach of the contributions caps arising from information contained in the original superannuation contributions report.
According to ATO deputy commissioner of taxation superannuation business line, Neil Olesen, the problem stems from that fact that a large number of cases where a breach of the contributions caps has been identified have come about from misreporting.
“As a result, we’ve had a significant re-reporting of contributions, with about 10 per cent of member contributions that are associated with an excess contributions tax liability being re-reported to us,” Olesen said.
“While most of that re-reporting is to correct errors, we do have a concern what’s being reported may not in fact be correct given that it occurs, often immediately, after we’ve notified a member they may have an excess contributions tax liability and it ultimately has an effect of eliminating that liability,” he said.
“That’s the reason why we will be upping our scrutiny of re-reporting over the next 12 months.”
In addition to re-reporting as a means of addressing excess contributions tax liabilities, Olesen said the ATO has also received applications for commissioner’s discretion for about 8 per cent of these types of assessments.
While he emphasised the application of this discretion is very limited, he revealed about 30 per cent of these applications have been successful so far.
