A senior sector stakeholder has stated the confirmation of the number of members an SMSF services as the critical element in determining the obligations and responsibilities by which the fund trustees are bound.
Heffron SMSF technical and education services director Leigh Mansell cited section 17a of the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) (SIS) Act as the defining piece of legislation SMSF trustees must reference when looking to define their responsibilities.
To this end, Mansell warned against approaching the exercise by starting with the SMSF trustee perspective.
“Within section 17a [of the SIS Act], where It defines what a self-managed fund is and the trustee rules, it says if you’ve got a single-member fund, then this set of trustee rules apply,” she told delegates at the Heffron Super Intensive Day 2025 held in Sydney yesterday.
“If you’ve got a multiple-member fund, then a completely different set of rules apply. So we need to know how many members we’ve got so that we know what rules apply.”
She suggested acknowledging this starting point will allow trustees and practitioners to manage slightly more complicated scenarios often occurring in SMSFs.
“It gets little bit tricky in our world from time to time, not all the time, because we might have a two-member fund that changes to a one-member fund,” she noted.
“So say somebody dies, or [a couple gets] divorced and somebody choofs off, or something happens and somebody just leaves the fund, [meaning] we often go from [an SMSF with] two [members] to one or one to two.
“We very rarely have a fund that just stays as [one with two members] forever. There [will be], at one point in time, something that causes a change. That’s where it can get a little bit tricky, when there is a change.”
