Happy 1 year anniversary to us!
Today we celebrated 1 year since we moved to our fabulous new Canberra office with a delicious tiramisu cake from our new local Braddon cafe, Ciao.
If you haven’t already visited our office this year, please come and check it out soon!
Although the finish line of 2020 is speeding towards us, we’re not slowing down just yet!
We will be busily working away until lunch time on Wednesday 23 December, when our offices will close down for a well deserved break.
We will then bounce back, all refreshed, and reopen on Monday 4 January – dare we suggest that you take some take during your break to gather together your 2020 tax information to send to us? It would certainly make for a Happy New Year….
Where a discretionary trust owns or part owns a property in NSW, the trust deed must now be amended to specifically exclude non-citizens of Australia (“foreign persons”) as potential beneficiaries now and in the future. Without this amendment, the trust will be taken to be a “foreign person”, and accordingly charged a 2% additional surcharge on land tax. The amendment must be lodged with Revenue NSW by 31 December, so time is short!
You may have received notice of this requirement a while ago, amended your deed, uploaded it to NSW Revenue and thought you could pat yourself on the back for being super organised. HOWEVER, some of our clients have recently received letters from NSW Revenue asking them to prove that the deed meets the requirements AGAIN (ie, upload the amendment again) before 31 December. So if you receive correspondence from NSW Revenue and think “I’ve already taken care of that”, don’t ignore it! Always best to check again, and please ask us for help.
While this law currently only relates to any Australian trusts that own property in NSW, it’s surely only a matter of time before other states follow suit, so it’s worth thinking about amending your deed in advance.
