This certainly helps.

As we have been telling all our clients and was the feature of week 2 of our plan, that we need to negotiate the deferment of tax payments in whatever way we can so that you can harbour the money as no one knows and can guess what the future looks likes.

The ATO has announced a series of administrative concessions for taxpayers impacted by the coronavirus (COVID-19), as follows:

 • Deferring by up to six months the payment of tax amounts due through the BAS (including PAYG instalments), income tax assessments, FBT assessments and excise.

This has been the bulk of work – even clients who may have the funds, we are suggesting take a deferment and harbour the money for the future.

Our team has negotiated for many of our clients already and this has extended to repayment plans as well so that there is relieve4 in cashflow as we face the next few months. It important to understand it’s not cancellation of debt.

• Allowing businesses on a quarterly reporting cycle to opt into monthly GST reporting to get quicker access to any GST refunds.

A business can only make this change from the start of a quarter, so a change now will take effect from 1 April 2020. Changing the GST reporting cycle to monthly doesn’t mean that a business has to change its PAYG withholding reporting cycle.

Rather, business can manage this by specifying the roles it is changing. Once a business chooses to report and pay GST monthly, the ATO says it must keep reporting monthly for 12 months before it can elect to revert to quarterly reporting.

Possibly helpful if you are going to take this time to make investments and look for the GST credit, we suspect there are few businesses where this will be helpful just planning the Jobkeeper payments is time consuming enough.

• allowing businesses to vary PAYG instalment amounts to zero for the April 2020 quarter. Businesses that vary their PAYG instalment to zero can also claim a  refund for any instalments made for the September 2019 and December 2019 quarters.

A quarterly PAYG instalments payer can vary its PAYG instalments on its activity statement for the March 2020 quarter. This can be done by lodging a revised activity statement before an instalment is due, and before the business lodges its income tax return for the year.

Serviced by related company Fresh Number Pty Ltd