There is a genuine sense many practices are not ready for the ongoing transfer balance account reporting (TBAR) requirements post 1 July 2018, according to an SMSF expert.
Smarter SMSF chief executive Aaron Dunn today told a webinar practices are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data and having to work through significant volumes of information to comply with the reporting requirements.
“There is a genuine sense here off the back of all this data that we’ve kind of scraped our way through to 30 June 2018, we got all of our transfer balance account reporting done, we got everything that we needed to do within the relevant time frames,” Dunn said.
“But that itself means for a lot of practices they haven’t looked forward to where we need to get to, given the changes that are now upon us, in particular when we think about the need to do transfer balance account reporting on a quarterly basis for a range of our retirement-phase clients.”
Dunn presented his 2018 Future of SMSF survey insights during the webinar, which found an underlying theme across accounting practices: there is new technology available, but the thinking remains old.
The survey of 488 respondents found 39.3 per cent of practices still provide an annual service offering, while 45 per cent of larger firms provide an annual service, indicating larger firms have more trouble migrating away from an annual service.
It also found almost 40 per cent of practices with revenue of between $500,000 and $999,000 said they only provide a service offering as required.
“Not only do we have an annual offering, but many people refer to the fact that we have an as-required [offering], but to me that is as much a problem because it refers to a reactive process rather than a prospective process,” Dunn said.
“That in itself is going to present some big challenges as we move forward through in particular the transfer balance account reporting requirements.”
The survey also found the TBAR requirements will result in 31 per cent of practices moving to regular reporting, while 57 per cent believe they are going to have to increase client engagement levels.
