The Self-Managed Super Fund Professionals' Association of Australia (SPAA) has expressed its opposition to some regulatory measures aimed at alleviating the strict timeline auditors have for completing the audit report of a self-managed super fund (SMSF).
Currently SMSF auditors must provide an audit report to the fund trustees by the time the fund's annual return is due.
Failure to comply with this deadline can result in severe penalties, including jail time in certain circumstances.
However, new draft legislation will allow auditors more time to provide their SMSF reports in two particular circumstances.
The first is where the appointment of the auditor by the SMSF trustees has been late. In these situations auditors have been given an additional 30 days to lodge their report from the time of their appointment.
The second scenario is where the auditor has not yet received additional information that has been requested from the SMSF trustees. Here, if the request for the information has been made at least 21 days before the annual return is due, and the trustees have not provided this information within seven days of the request, the auditor will have an additional seven days to file the audit report.
Commenting on these proposed changes at the 2012 SPAA National Conference, association technical director Peter Burgess said: "While we acknowledge the good intentions of the policy makers and we agree the legislation should be changed, we actually hope these changes never see the light of day in their current form.
"We believe they are too complicated and unworkable in their current form. Auditors are typically auditing multiple funds at once and they're going to have to keep records of which funds they've asked the trustees for documents and work out what the due dates are for their reports.
"So we think this is pretty much unworkable and we're probably better off with what we've got at the moment."
To view video coverage of the 2012 SPAA SMSF National Conference, please visit InvestorDaily's video page.
