End of financial year tax tips from the ATO

The end of the financial year is a great opportunity to give your small business a health check to make sure you’re on top of all your obligations and responsibilities.

GST obligations

First and foremost, it’s a good idea to make sure you lodge and pay on time to avoid penalties.

We advise you to, where possible, keep GST you collect separate from your business account, so you don’t have payment problems when your BAS payment is due.

But if you can’t pay or lodge on time for any reason, don’t be afraid to contact us.

We’re as keen as you are for your business to succeed and we have an enormous amount of experience and expertise to help you get back on track.

Always lodge your BAS on time, even if you have nothing to report and we encourage you to leave paper shuffling behind by lodging your BAS and other reporting online.

We’ve got a small business portal and our ECI software to make this as easy as possible.

Capital gains tax

Remember to make sure you report capital gains from the sale or disposal of shares or property.

There are some concessions such as the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) discount and the small business CGT concessions that can reduce the gain, so make sure you keep good records so you can get it right.

Record keeping

Take some time to ensure all your records are in order.

It’ll help your tax agent prepare your tax return, by providing details of your business income and expenditure and make sure you claim all the appropriate deductions and entitlements.

PAYG and superannuation

When it comes to your employees, you must provide them with payment summaries (previously called “group certificates”) no later than July 14 so they can complete their tax returns, even if you were not required to withhold tax from their pay. These payments must also be included in your pay as you go (PAYG) payment summary annual report.

And remember, legislation increasing the super guarantee to 9.5% (from 9.25%) has been passed and is due to apply from July 1. There’s a range of information on our website about what people need to do.

Our focus

If you happen to be in the building and construction industry, I would point out that the ATO is focusing on payments to contractors as part of our compliance program, so we’ll be taking a close look at your Taxable payments annual report which is due by July 21.

As well as their name and address, you need to report each contractor’s ABN, gross amount paid for the financial year and the total GST.

Go online

The ATO has a range of online information, tools and other software to not only make the health check worthwhile, but also as painless as possible.

Our online assistance is available 24/7 to fit your schedule and we’ve provided access to some key products we offer via the ATO app for smart phones and tablets, so you can get some of the work done when time permits no matter where you are.

For more information

For more information on any end-of-financial-year tax issues go to ato.gov.au/smallbusinessor talk to your registered tax agent.

Steve Vesperman is a deputy commissioner of the Australian Tax Office.