ASFA hits ATO on data pass through

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) has voiced its strong opposition to an Australian Taxation Office (ATO) proposal that all superannuation funds must provide a contribution data pass through service to their default employers.

In a strongly worded letter to the Treasury responding to exposure draft regulations, ASFA has declared it is "concerned that the rationale for mandatory pass through of contributions data has not been clearly established".

Further it claimed that there appeared to have been no revision of the ATO's thinking on the topic as the implementation of the data standards had unfolded and had taken a different path to that originally envisioned.

"Absent such a rationale, the unanswered question is: What is achieved by forcing all funds to pass through the data, but not the money, that the data standards themselves do not achieve?" the ASFA response asked.

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"The ATO's stated reason for the requirement has been the delivery of the SuperStream goal of enabling employers to use a single method of delivering superannuation contributions and data to any fund, however, we note that this issue has been resolved through the creation of the SuperStream Transaction Network of gateways in 2013 and a range of associated ATO and commercially offered services," it said.

The ASFA response said that in recent discussions with Treasury officials on the proposed scope of the regulations it appeared that, from Treasury's perspective, there was no intent to require funds to provide a contributions data pass through service beyond that which occurred naturally within the operation of the SuperStream Transaction Network.

It said the advice of Treasury officials was that the purpose of the regulations was to ensure that a fund trustee could not, from 1 July 2015, offer to a default employer an electronic contributions data handling service that would only accept contributions data for that fund.