Our latest insights

The Labor Government has followed through on its election commitment of a multinational tax integrity package to target the tax loopholes used by multinational enterprises (MNEs) and to improve tax transparency, with the release of Treasury’s Discussion Paper on 5 August 2022.

On 1 August 2022, Treasury released draft legislation to prevent the taxation by Australia of Indian resident firms providing certain technical services performed outside Australia to Australian customers.

Yesterday the Australian Capital Territory’s (ACT) Chief Minister Andrew Barr handed down the ACT budget.

The ATO has recently announced that they have now re-commenced issuing requests to release excess contributions and other charges for superannuation fund members who did not make an election on how they would like to treat their excess non-concessional contributions for prior financial years.

The Payment Times Reporting (PTR) Scheme was introduced on 1 January 2021, requiring large businesses to report on the payment terms, and invoice payment times for their small business suppliers.

Last week the NCAT Appeals Panel released their decision on a recent payroll tax case, Thomas & Naaz, likely to have a significant impact on medical and allied health practices.

On 20 July 2022 the ATO released its Taxpayer Alert TA 2022/2 to remind taxpayers not to undertake “treaty shopping” arrangements in order to reduce Australian withholding tax (WHT) under a Double Tax Agreement (DTA) in relation to a royalty or unfranked dividend payment from Australia.

The Government today introduced draft legislation to give effect to a pre-election promise to exempt (non-luxury) electric cars from fringe benefits tax (FBT). In further good news, hybrid electric cars have now been added to the exemption – we assume due to the extreme wait times for new electric cars at the moment, which would otherwise have significantly dampened the effect of the new law.

Following on from the ATO’s guide to professional services firms’ allocation of profits in PCG 2021/4, the ATO has now further tightened its compliance scrutiny of individual professionals’ ability to assign or stream income away from themselves to family members by releasing its compliance approach to so-called Everett assignments.

Following industry consultation released late last year APRA recently finalised revisions to Prudential Standard APS 220 Credit Risk management, effective September 2022, to include a new Attachment C - Macroprudential policy: credit measures. Under the new requirements, ADIs must be operationally prepared to implement certain macroprudential policy measures, if needed to avoid potential barriers to timely and effective implementation.

With the 2022 financial year coming to a close, private health insurers face a number of considerations in regulation and their year-end financial reporting.

The Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) has announced its strategic priorities for 2022-23 including where audit and enforcement activities will be undertaken in relation to wage underpayments.