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With the recent collapse of a second Australian cryptocurrency exchange in as many months, along with persistent reports of a range of sophisticated cryptocurrency scams targeting Australians, many cryptocurrency owners are asking if you lose money in a scam can you deduct the loss? The short answer is it depends.
The ATO has recently issued an alert warning taxpayers against disguising undeclared foreign income as gifts or loans from related overseas entities, including family and friends. It says it has continued to encounter instances where Australian resident taxpayers derive income or capital gains offshore which are assessable but fail to declare it in their income tax returns.
Since the heady days of 2012, when the ATO published its first tax gap estimates by releasing the GST and LCT (luxury car tax) gaps, the latest figures released by the ATO encompass every income and transactional tax as a measure of the total tax performance of the system. The most recent overall estimate of tax performance is around 92.7% which means that the ATO received 92.7% of the total tax revenue that should be reported according to current law, equating to around $428bn.
If you’re a small business owner and the pandemic has made you reassess your future, whether it be retirement or selling your business and starting afresh somewhere else, just remember that there may be capital gains tax (CGT) consequences to such a move. However, the tax law does provide four concessions to enable eligible individuals to eliminate or at least reduce the capital gain on a CGT asset provided certain conditions are met.
The director identification regime is now in place. If you’re a director of a corporate trustee of an SMSF, you’ll need to apply for a director ID number online through the new Australian Business Registry Services (ABRS) before the deadline. A director ID is a 15 digit identifier given to a director (or someone who intends to become a director) that has verified their identity with ABRS.
The government has recently introduced a raft of superannuation and related changes that will affect retirees, first home buyers, and low earning employees. Each of the changes are explained in detail below.
Micro businesses in NSW that met aggregated annual turnover and other eligibility conditions were eligible for the 2021 COVID-19 micro-business grant if they were impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. Whilst application for the grant has closed, and current recipients are due to have their last payment on 30 November 2021, Service NSW temporarily paused payments on 1 November to some recipients to allow additional analysis and assessments to be carried out in response to “increased fraud activity”.
According to some recent statistics released by ASIC, six of Australia’s largest banking and financial services institutions have paid or offered a total of $1.86bn in compensation, as at 30 June 2021. This is in relation to customers who have suffered a loss or experienced a detriment due to fees for no service misconduct or non-compliant advice. At least some of this compensation would have been paid to super funds including SMSFs.
A new data matching program is underway in relation to government payments for the 2018-19 to 2022-23 income years. While it may sound boring, if you dig underneath its innocuous exterior, you’ll find that this program covers a wide range of areas. In essence, it covers most services that the Commonwealth government pay third party providers to deliver in relation to the programs they administer.
Due to the ongoing economic impacts of COVID-19 on large parts of Australia, in particular those States and Territories which have had to endure lengthy lockdowns throughout the year, the ATO has announced the extension of various COVID-19 relief for SMSF trustees to the 2021-22 financial year. The relief previously only applied to the 2019-20 and 2020-21 financial years.
The government has announced the phasing out of the COVID-19 disaster payment to individuals as the country gradually reaches various vaccine targets and learns to live with the virus. The payment was begrudgingly provided by the Federal government during the current wave of lockdowns after criticisms and calls to bring back to JobKeeper which kept the relationship between employers and employee intact.
Employers beware, from 1 November 2021, if you’re hiring new employees, there may be an extra step involved in determining which super fund employee contributions need to be paid into. Currently, when a new employee starts a new job, they are eligible to choose the super fund that their super guarantee contributions go to. If they do not choose their own fund, the super contributions will be paid into the employer’s default fund.