Employers in the dark on super reporting changes
Most employers are not up to speed on streamlined superannuation reporting despite its introduction being a little over a month away, a survey has found .
Business technology company Attaché Software's recent survey of 2800 companies found many software vendors are leaving their clients vulnerable.
From 1 July, employers with more than 20 employees have to adhere to super reporting changes that will assist employees by adding $45,000 over the life of their super fund.
But most employers have little or no understanding of the changes.
"It's a combination of compliance fatigue and upgrade overload, underpinned by an intransigent resistance to change," general manager of Attaché business software Matt Paff said.
Employers have seen various changes in the last decade, including SuperChoice in 2005, WorkChoices in 2006, special ordinary time earnings for superannuation in 2008, Fair Work replacing WorkChoices in 2009 and Modern Awards in 2010.
Under this, 4200 state awards had to merge into 122 federal awards.
"Obviously employers have been dealt a cruel hand through this period but so, too, have the software vendors," Paff said.
"There are over 185 — and counting — payroll systems in Australia."
The introduction of SuperChoice in 2005 has meant rollovers and lodgements have not caught up with technology; cheques are handwritten, posted and banked; and staff have to manually key in entries.
"SuperChoice heralded a raft of inevitable compliance variations to superannuation reporting, so we introduced software to save our clients on average two weeks a year in manual reporting," Paff said.
"The Government could have (and should have) introduced this 10 years ago."
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