TaxRambling.com

And the third Bill passed today (but still to be approved by the Government majority in the House of Reps, so pretty much a formality) increases the number of members of a self managed superannuation fund from ‘fewer than 5 members’ (meaning 4 or less members) to ‘no more than 6 members’ (now can have 5 or 6 members).

This was proposed to fix the Shorten proposal at the last election to remove refundable imputation credits from SMSF as you could add more members to use the credits. But as this is not on the table any more I don’t think too many of us will be looking to manage these larger SMSFs.

It is worth noting that the number of individual trustees that a trust can have may be limited to less than five or six trustees by State legislation. If this is the case the SMSF will need to use a corporate trustee as all the members could not be trustees in their own name.

Lastly the new rules state that an SMSF with one or two directors or individual trustees must have its accounts and statements signed by all of those directors or trustees, but all other SMSFs with between three and six directors or trustees, the accounts and statements of the SMSF must be signed by at least half of the directors or individual trustees.