Several senior SMSF stakeholders have confirmed an official off-market transfer form is not necessarily the key piece of evidence to prove an in-specie contribution involving shares has been made and ownership of the assets in question has shifted.
The affirmation was made with regard to the development that Commonwealth Bank of Australia is accepting online off-market transfer requests between CommSec accounts without a signed form.
“Self Managed Super Fund Ruling (SMSFR) 2010/1 says that normally for shares, arguing beneficial ownership is prior to legal ownership, it refers to an off-market transfer and the issue we of course have with this ruling is it was issued in 2010 and since then there have been a lot advances and it seems one of those is we don’t actually need to sign an off-market transfer form to effect such a transaction,” Accurium head of SMSF education Mark Ellem acknowledged during a question and answer panel session at the recent SMSF Professionals Day 2026.
Accurium technical superannuation adviser Jason Hurst noted while SMSFR 2010/1 refers to a formal off-market transfer form, it does not dictate this document is counted as proof of beneficial ownership as opposed to alternative internal sharebroker paperwork.
“We’re not really sure whether the ATO has used that off-market transfer form as a catch-all for all types of forms or not, so there certainly is some doubt,” Hurst said.
“If you apply that logic I guess if you have all the forms allowing the shares to be transferred from say a personal CommSec account to an SMSF CommSec account and the ATO did agree that was along the same lines as an off-market transfer form, then that could be okay.”
Accurium senior SMSF educator Anthony Cullen suggested the off-market transfer form itself is potentially just the last component in relation to an in-specie contribution of shares.
“The ruling does talk about the requirement for members looking to make an in-specie contribution to ensure the trustees of the fund having minutes to say they are going to accept the contribution,” Cullen noted.
“So putting aside the CommSec aspect, whenever we execute an in-specie transfer we also want to think about what other paperwork we have to support the process and reflect where beneficial ownership might change. That probably becomes more important in this scenario.”
Darin Tyson-Chan
Editor
Darin is the founder and publisher of Benchmark Media, an independent publishing house whose mastheads include financialobserver, selfmanagedsuper and smstrusteenews. He has been covering the financial services space for over a decade and in this time he has worked for a variety of trade publications. Darin has also written for the Money section published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Articles by Darin