The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has changed its compliance strategy for auditors of self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF) for the current financial year.
The regulator has decided to place greater emphasis on the competency requirements formulated by the various accounting bodies for approved SMSF auditors. To this end the ATO said it would now be reinforcing the standards imposed by those professional bodies, while communicating the level of competency it would also be expecting as the regulator of the sector.
The change in tack comes as the ATO expressed its opinion the auditor compliance program it had run had to date been successful.
The regulator said it had noticed a general improvement in the performance of approved SMSF auditors during the 2010 financial year.
Despite this improvement the ATO still disqualified 11 approved auditors over this period. In general, practitioners were disqualified for not addressing independence threats sufficiently, not identifying and clearly reporting SMSF breaches and not maintaining adequate documentation showing an audit of an SMSF had been performed properly.
Furthermore, the ATO highlighted practitioners who audited a very low number of SMSFs remained a concern and were still an area of focus for its compliance activities.
