What a week!

What a week for small businesses! As members would have seen in our Special Budget Edition of TaxVine issued on Tuesday night, many new changes were announced benefitting small business taxpayers, including tax cuts, an immediate deduction for professional fees and the ‘big ticket' item, an immediate deduction for assets costing less than $20,000 available from Budget night.

However, this Budget was also about protecting integrity in our tax system, with the introduction of a variety of measures to combat multinational tax avoidance including a new anti-avoidance provision and more extensive transfer pricing documentation requirements, and a proposal to extend the reach of the GST to apply to cross border supplies of digital products and services imported into Australia. We are already busy consulting on these new measures with the release of the Exposure Drafts on Budget night. Members interested in these consultations can find further details about them on the Treasury website.

It's not all about the Budget though. Treasury has been busy of late consulting on many of the ‘un-enacted measures' that are still hanging around – earn outs, scrip-for-scrip rollover changes and amendments to consolidation to name a few. The ATO too is hard at work working out how best to implement all these new changes, such as developing standard documentation and safe harbours for the new employee share scheme rules and getting to work on guidance material for taxpayers in relation to the new managed investment trust rules. There are busy times ahead.

Stephanie Caredes CTA is a Tax Counsel of The Tax Institute.

The Tax Institute is Australia’s leading professional association in tax. Its 13,000 members include tax agents, accountants and lawyers as well as tax practitioners in corporations, government and academia.

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