Articles

Question We are a Council. If we allow our staff to salary sacrifice their Council rates can we apply the FBT in-house benefit valuation rules and the $1,000 in-house benefit reduction to reduce the FBT impost? Answer The discharging of an employee’s municipal rates obligation by foregoing salary under an effective salary sacrifice arrangement is […]

On the 29th of June 2022, the Government announced a proposal to provide an exemption for Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT) on electric cars from 1 July 2022. On the 27th of July 2022, Treasury Laws Amendment (Electric Car Discount) Bill 2022 (the Bill) was introduced to Federal Parliament containing the proposed legalisation to give effect […]

Question Our organisation generally elects to use the 50/50 method in the Division 9A ‘meal entertainment’ provisions of the Fringe Benefits Tax Assessment Act 1986  (the ‘FBT Act’). Can we use the ‘minor benefits’ exemption to disregard ad-hoc meal entertainment costing less than $300 (including GST) per recipient? Answer When using the meal entertainment provisions, […]

Question We have inadvertently overpaid a staff member a significant amount of wages. At the moment, we are looking to setup a repayment plan, where the employee would pay back, on an interest-free basis, the amount over 3-5 years. Can you please confirm that each new FBT year, to calculate the fringe benefit, we use […]

Almost 400 charities that failed to submit two or more ACNC Annual Information Statements (AIS’s) have lost their registration. In April 2022, the ACNC notified another almost 750 organisations that they also risked revocation for failure to lodge AIS’s (source: extract from ACNC media release of 19 May 2022). This type of ACNC compliance activity […]

It is becoming increasingly common for charities and not-for-profits around the world to accept donations in the form of cryptocurrency. For Australian charities and not-for-profits looking to accept such donations, the ATO has provided a timely reminder of a variety of issues that arise where cryptocurrency donations are to be accepted, specifically: Organisations need to […]

Question We have a staff member that has been  appointed to a new role. The staff member currently works in our Melbourne office but the new role is located on the Victorian-NSW border and so it would be impractical for the staff member to commute to work on an ongoing basis. As a result, the […]

With a change of Government comes new policies and the scrapping of policies previously announced under the former Government (which may include pending legislation lapsing in Parliament). In this article we have identified a few key tax areas in which the change of Government may affect issues previously covered for TaxEd members. FBT Exemption for […]

On 9 May 2022 the Federal Court of Australia handed down judgment in the Landcom Case (Landcom v Commissioner of Taxation [2022] FCA 510). The case deals with a number of interesting GST matters, and in this article we bring to your attention to one aspect of the case regarding GST and the margin scheme. […]

The end of the financial year (30 June) usually prompts a review of bad and doubtful debts. So, it is worth revisiting the GST rules that apply to bad debts. The GST law contains specific rules for dealing with bad debts. However, those same rules also contain a rule regarding overdue debts, specifically where a […]