Taxation Matters

The ATO has released publications to assist employees from various industries with working out what claims they can make in their 2008 tax returns.

Occupations include: building industry employees; business professionals; hospitality industry employees; mechanical, automotive and electrical tradespersons; and real estate employees.

http://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/pathway.asp?pc=001/002/010&mfp=001/002&mnu=37095
Source: CPA Tax News3/7/08

Parents across Australia should keep their receipts for education expenses to make the most of the benefits available under the Rudd Government's $4.4 billion Education Tax Refund.
The Education Tax Refund will provide parents with much-needed help for education expenses, with refunds of up to:

• $375 per primary school student; and
• $750 per secondary school student.

Parents bringing up the next generation of Australians are doing perhaps the most important job in Australia.

Every company director needs to make sure that tax is paid, and on time – the consequences can be severe.

Being a director of a company, even a small or medium sized enterprise, carries with it important obligations.

One of those is to make sure the company remits tax deducted from employees’ wages to the tax office on time. Failure to do so can result in the director being personally liable for that tax.

From 1 July 2008 more businesses can claim fuel tax credits for the fuel they acquire and use in a range of business activities, machinery, plant, equipment and heavy vehicles. The only fuels that are not eligible are aviation fuels, alternative fuels and fuels used in light vehicles of 4.5 tonne gross vehicle mass (GVM) or less travelling on a public road (for example, a car or small van).

The amount businesses can claim is 18.51, 19.0715 or 38.143 cents per litre depending on how the fuel is used.

Business owners have limited options to save on tax – and they’re disappearing rapidly. We run through 10 of the best tax-saving strategies.

The best tax-savings strategies for SMEs in 2007-08 and beyond are spearheaded by the much-improved opportunities to save tax-effectively through super, to minimise or eliminate tax on the sale of small businesses, and to maximise the value from the successive cuts in personal taxes.

Compliance, although always an issue, has been honed by the taxman to three points of interest for businesses this year.

This year the tax office is focused on three areas for compliance by small and medium businesses:

There is not much positive tax relief for small businesses in the 2008 Budget, other than confirmation of the tax cuts that were previously announced by the Treasurer, extending the capital gains tax (CGT) small business concessions. No substantive changes were made to superannuation.  

The ATO has announced the 2008 - 2009 indexed superannuation rates and thresholds in its publication, Key superannuation rates and thresholds:

http://www.ato.gov.au/super/content.asp?doc=/content/60489.htm

Log books – yuk!  We all hate filling them out as it's time consuming and, oh so boring!

Unfortunately, the tax office has some very specific rules for completion in order to maximise and validate your claim.

A correctly completed log book will be valid for five years.  If you have more than one car for business purposes, a separate log book must be kept for each car.

Is tax time a dreaded chore? Look at how you can minimise the dread and maximise the time, and effort spent on preparing accounts by turning this into a valuable activity for improving your business
 
While not all businesses need to have a full annual audit, they all need to prepare some sort of annual accounts, even if only for tax reasons.