SuperConcepts has launched a small campaign about the Government’s three-year self-managed superannuation fund (SMSF) audit proposal, with the group’s chief executive, Natasha Fenech, saying that the long audit cycle “put trustees at risk of mistakes and potential fines”.
“We have deep concerns that trustees might be exposed to breaches through errors made over such a long period as three years,” Fenech said.
“That’s a lot of transactions to get right and it’s a lot easier to deal with mistakes when they’re found earlier. Mistakes happen, just look at the 2000 SMSF trustees who made excess transfer balances by June 30.”
Fenech said that while it was “politically tempting” to offer trustees the ease and reduced costs of three-year auditing, the policy opened up “ordinary citizens” to greater complexities in their SMSFs if issues were not picked up earlier.
She said that this could actually result in higher costs for trustees, as the expense and effort needed to rectify issues that were picked up later could be compounded by the added time.
I’m a SuperConcepts client and I am very disappointed that SuperConcepts appears to be opposed to a measure which, if implemented, will reduce my overall audit costs. I can understand why the accounting bodies are reluctant about the new proposal: they are concerned about the volume and lumpiness of audit fees payable to their members and about the potential for things to go wrong mainly in the context of suburban accountants with poor record keeping systems. But SuperConcepts in my experience has strong and reliable accounting systems. So why does SuperConcepts want to increase the costs I need to pay for the audit of my SMSF?
Not happy, SuperConcepts.