Australians with self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) have been warned to avoid “illegal early access” of their retirement savings.
Australian Taxation Office (ATO) assistant commissioner Justin Micale said the ATO was seeing an increasing number of SMSF trustees taking advantage of their direct access to their superannuation bank account.
They are then using these savings to pay for items such as business debts, holidays, renovations and new cars, he added.
Micale said that, sometimes, trustees stop lodging annual returns to avoid detection or to get additional time to put the money back in before they lodge.
“If they do lodge, regardless of whether the money was put back into the fund, early access is usually picked up and reported to us in an auditor contravention report as a loan or breach of the payment standards,” he said.
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