SMSF auditors will be required to report non-compliance with SuperStream rollover rules, but only from the start of October and not from the initial 1 March start date of the service, the ATO has said.
The SMSF regulator stated, via an update on its website, that SMSF auditors will only need to report contraventions using the auditor/actuary contravention report (ACR) if the rollover was requested from 1 October and the contravention met ACR reporting criteria.
In accordance with the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Regulations 1994 (SISR), the ATO said: “If a trustee fails to comply with the rules in [SISR] Division 6.5, this is a contravention of the ‘payment standards’ in Part 6 of the SISR, in particular regulation 6.17.
“As regulation 6.17 is a reportable contravention, auditors will need to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to form an opinion on whether the fund has complied with the rules in Division 6.5.”
Auditors examining an SMSF that is the transferring fund of a rollover will need to confirm the fund has received the request either from the member, receiving fund or ATO, the rollover was made via SuperStream and the rollover occurred no more than three business days after all the necessary information was received to process the request.
In circumstances where the SMSF is receiving a rollover, the ATO stated where a rollover request was received by the fund directly from the member, an auditor should check the SMSF trustee used SuperStream to request the rollover from the transferring fund and the rollover was allocated to the member within three business days after it was received.
It added where an SMSF auditor found non-compliance, they were required to notify the fund trustees in writing, report to the regulator via Section E in the ACR, noting the failure to comply with SuperStream rules, and modify part B of the SMSF independent auditor’s report if material.
The decision to use 1 October as the start date for checking non-compliance is consistent with the ATO’s move to not require SMSF trustees to use the SuperStream service for rollovers until that date, despite the SISR extending the operation of SuperStream to cover SMSFs from 1 March.
“While the law requires SMSF trustees to comply with the SuperStream rules for any rollovers requested to and from an SMSF from 31 March 2021, the commissioner has given trustees until 1 October 2021 to transition and onboard to SuperStream. This means we expect trustees to comply with the rules from 1 October 2021,” the regulator said.
