The ATO is in the process of formulating guidance material for auditors with regard to the treatment of digital assets and in particular cryptocurrency.
“We’re hoping that will be available in the next few months. We’ve actually sent it out to our audit stakeholder group for some feedback as well,” ATO SMSF regulatory branch director Kellie Grant revealed in a special interview for the recently held SMSF Association Audit Day 2026.
“So we’re getting some really good input from auditor groups on what they do.”
The guidance is being developed to address concerns the ATO has over the review of digital assets and, specifically, the fact practitioners are not fulfilling their obligation to gather sufficient and appropriate audit evidence in relation to these types of SMSF holdings.
“We’re seeing some files where the trustees have just given their auditors an Excel spreadsheet with a bunch of crypto transactions that have happened in the fund,” Grant explained.
“We want to see auditors independently verify the SMSF’s wallet balances and sample transactions using that public blockchain data.
“We also find the auditors are just relying on the holding statements from the crypto exchanges to verify existence and ownership when we expect them to do some additional substantive testing and attain a Type 2 report if they can.”
She conceded the aforementioned information may not be available in all trustee circumstances, but outlined what the regulator expects an auditor to do when faced with this challenge.
“When that evidence is not available, what we do want to see is that they comply with their auditing obligations and they’re modifying their auditor’s opinion in the independent audit report and then lodging an ACR (auditor contravention report) if the reporting criteria is met,” she indicated.
“Because if you can’t get evidence, there’s no harm in modifying the audit report.
“And I think it not only protects you from action that we can take as regulators but litigation risk as well if anything goes wrong with that investment.”
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.
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