May 2016

Gold Coast businesses under the ATO’s microscope

As an element of a continuing, Australia-wide program, the Australian tax Office has cautioned that it’s going to pay a visit to restaurants, cafés and take-aways, in addition to beauty salons and nail bars, on the Gold Coast.

Assistant Commissioner Matthew Bambrick mentioned “In all, we will be checking out about 250 businesses in the Gold Coast to discuss a variety of topics, such as business registration, record-keeping, superannuation and lodgement.”

“Where taxpayers are not willing to work with us or continue to cause us concern, we are going to undertake additional investigation. In Sydney and Melbourne, for instance, we now have moved to auditing businesses that just didn’t want to work with us.”

New rules for selling property over $2 million

From 1 July 2016, new regulations will affect sales of taxable Australian property (e.g., real-estate) with a market value of $2,000, 000 or higher. A 10% non-final withholding tax might apply to all contracts to sell such property entered into on or following 1 July 2016.

Australian resident vendors selling this kind of real estate will have to obtain a clearance certificate from the Australian Tax Office ahead of settlement in order to avoid the 10% non-final withholding tax.

Note: This new 10% withholding tax was actually only created to utilize to non-residents selling

Australian real estate. However, it equally applies to Australian resident vendors and pushes them to acquire a clearance certificate from the ATO to, in fact, demonstrate that they are Australian residents. In most cases, clients are going to be affected for sales of residential and commercial real estate, or companies or trusts that hold such properties.

Cancellation of Trust ABN’s

From February, 2016 onwards, the registrar of the Australian Business Register has begun cancelling the Australian business numbers (ABNs) of certain trusts.

The focused trusts are entities for which tax records suggest that they’re no more continuing a business. The ABR anticipates that roughly 220,000 trusts might be lined up to get their ABN cancelled.

ABN cancellations will be started where by the ATO data matching signifies no lodgement of BAS and/or trust income tax returns in the last two years.

Exceptions to the ABN cancellations apply to trusts which are registered with Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission or are a non-reporting member of a GST or income tax group. Having said that, we have seen substantial activity in the deregistering of charities for dormant or no compliance activity.

Government states that the trustees will get a letter in the mail if their ABN is terminated. The notice will include the reason behind the cancellation, and a contact number to call to have the ABN reinstated. The government says this will be able to be affected immediately in case a trustee won’t agree with the decision, even though it’s not clear if proof activity or viability might be needed.

Our recommendation is that you check your myGov site and get in touch with your small business adviser.

In case you have a trust and its ABN is terminated you don’t get a letter, it may imply your contact information is not up to date on the Australian Business Register’s ABN database.

Call Accountants Cranbourne at 1300 300 106 for further information.