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Recently, arguments both for and against increasing the rate of compulsory superannuation guarantee (‘SG’) have continued to be tossed around!

The SG is the compulsory amount of superannuation an employer must pay into an eligible employee’s chosen super fund. 

The rate of SG has been frozen at 9.5% of an employee’s ordinary wages since July 2014, but from 1 July 2021 it is due to incrementally increase (by 0.5% each financial year) until it ultimately reaches 12% in July 2025.  

As a result, the superannuation guarantee rate is currently set to increase to 10% from 1 July 2021.

Editor: At this stage, despite a lot of political rhetoric and media coverage, no change has been announced to change these set plans. 

Speaking of the superannuation guarantee, time is rapidly running out for employers to apply for the SG amnesty and catch up on past unpaid super without incurring a penalty.

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On 21 July 2020, the Government announced that the JobKeeper Payment (‘JKP’) would be extended until 28 March 2021 (i.e., for a further six months beyond its original end date of 27 September 2020).  

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Additional recently implemented JobKeeper changes mean more employees will qualifyfor JobKeeper payments from 3 August 2020.

This is primarily because: 

• the eligible employee testhas been extended from 3 August 2020to include eligible employees who were employed on 1 July 2020(in addition to the original 1 March 2020 employment date) who are not currently nominated for the JKP by another entity; and

• from the fortnights commencing on 3 August 2020 and 17 August 2020 (i.e., JobKeeper fortnights 10 and 11) employers will have had until 31 August 2020to meet the‘wage condition’ for all new eligible employees included in the JobKeeper scheme under the 1 July eligibility test.

Importantly, as a result of these recent tweaks to the JobKeeper scheme, participating employers should have provided any new eligible employees with an employee nomination form.

The onus is on employers to ensure all of their employees now eligible for JKPs as a result of the new 1 July test are given the opportunity to be included. 

Ref: More employees now able to access JobKeeper, ATO media release, 19 August 2020.

Did you know that as of 2020, an estimated 41% of Small to Medium Enterprises, don’t use an online accounting software? Further to this, an estimated 24% of SME’s have no computerised accounting solution at all.

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