The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has indicated the regulations regarding the operation of pensions as defined by tax ruling TR 2011/D3 are set to be amended again.
The anticipation for these changes come from a presentation delivered by the deputy commissioner of taxation in Adelaide last week.
“It sounds like we’re going to have a final ruling prior to the end of the financial year and it could potentially be a total rewrite of the draft ruling that we’ve seen,” Cavendish Superannuation head of technical services Tim Miller said.
“There is gong to be a lot of additional or changed information in that final ruling based on the feedback received and I can only assume that the feedback the tax office has received was negative,” he added.
The current draft ruling, handed down in the middle of this year, was the catalyst for superannuation members, particularly those belonging to self-managed super funds to revisit their pension practices.
“There was a lot of attention given to this ruling when it was released. There was a lot of forecast gloom and doom in the way that death benefits were being processed and all sorts of things,” Miller said.
“But I actually looked at it from the point of view that a lot of the information contained within the ruling was material that we knew already, it’s just that there was some additional practical implications attached to them.”
