Tax Rambling

Here is the letter I wrote today to the Treasurer explaining why… Dear Minister, On 6 February the Commissioner of Taxation announced that, starting 1 July 2021, not-for-profit clubs or associations (for example, school parent associations or local sporting clubs) will need to report under single touch payroll per pay event rather than quarterly. Many of […]

What is the Company Tax Rate? This once was an easy question. Only a few years ago the answer was easy… 30%. But recently there have been numerous changes to the company tax rate. In addition to the 30% tax rate we now have a lower rate, which is… Year                        BRE tax rate (%)2017-18                       27.52018-19                       27.52019-20                       27.52020-21                       26.02021-22 onwards        25.0 Note […]

Sorry I keep writing about US taxes but they are going quite crazy with tax changes… and the craziest I have seen is the proposed Washington State Wealth Tax. It only applies if you have more than $1 billion in wealth and the tax each year is 1% of your wealth. But according to the […]

Back on 1 July 2017 we all became experts on the $1.6 million transfer balance cap. The only amount that we could transfer into a tax free retirement phase was $1.6 million.  But now the Commissioner has just told us that the “superannuation general transfer balance cap” will increase from $1.6m to $1.7m on 1 […]

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly a new tax such that any company whose top executive earns 100 times more than their median worker will pay an extra 0.1% surcharge on its annual business tax payment. If a CEO makes 200 times more than the median employee, the surcharge increases to 0.2%; 300 times gets a 0.3% […]

I do like making life hard for people who ask me basic tax questions. When they ask me if they can claim a tax deduction for a work related expense, I like to say, “based on what I can see, you can’t claim the deduction.” I say that as to be technically correct, if they […]

Each year the Commissioner releases a tax determination that encourages drinking. This year it is TD 2021/1 titled “value of goods taken from stock for private use for the 2020-21 income year”. Back in 2004, the Commissioner released a Practice Statement on valuing goods taken from trading stock for private use by sole traders or […]

I am sure there is no connection between these two events at all… California is going to impose a 0.4% tax on residents with a worldwide net worth in excess of $30,000,000. The proposed tax applies to anyone spending as little as 60 days in California. Finally, it continues to apply for 10 years after […]

Joe Biden is will become the 46th President next week. While many of his policies are vague, tax is not one of them. And with the Democrats having control of Congress it is likely all these changes will be made… Imagine having to advise your clients about these changes… The highest marginal tax rate (kicking […]

We all know that on budget night we got an instant asset write off – for most of our clients with aggregated turnovers under $50 million, new and second hand assets of any value can be immediately written off (between $50 million and $5 billion only can write off new assets). But we quickly realised […]