With only a few days to go to the end of the financial year I thought its a good time to bring you up to date with some of the events of the past month, and some changes happening from 1 July.
I spent two days earlier this week at the National Tax & Accountants Association Tax Schools – 13 hours learning about changes to the tax system and how it will impact on our clients – important, but not my idea of fun.
The Government has again increased the funding it provides to the ATO to combat tax avoidance, with every dollar of funding estimated to result in $4 of additional tax revenue collected. There have also been some changes to legislation to close a few loopholes. Naturally, additional ATO funding means their data matching programs are becoming more sophisticated and of broader scope – so expect increased audit or investigation activity. Not a major problem if you’re doing the right thing and your records are in order.
From 1 July 2019, if business taxpayers do not meet their PAYG withholding and reporting obligations, they will not be able to claim a tax deduction for payments:
• of salary, wages, commissions, bonuses or allowances to an employee;
• of directors’ fees;
• to a religious practitioner;
• under a labour hire arrangement, or;
• made for services where the supplier does not provide their ABN.
If you think you may be impacted by these changes, please give me a call to discuss.
From an individual taxpayer’s perspective, target areas this year include rental properties, home office expenses and other work-related expenses, work-related travel and vehicle expenses.
On a brighter note, we achieved our overall B1G1 target for our 365,000 giving events for the year at the start of June! We also hit the individual giving targets for the four projects we supported this financial year today – with just a couple of days to spare. Keep an eye out next week when I announce our giving targets for 2019/20 – we’ll be supporting the same four projects as this year but we’ve also added a new project for the coming year. Thank you to everyone for helping us reach our targets!
