If you’re in business in Australia, the probability is that you’re paying more tax than you should. The problem is that most business people don’t have the time or the knowledge base to really manage their tax properly. If you ask tax accountants in Sydney, you’ll be told that most businesses really could do better and reduce their tax significantly if they adopted structured tax management programs.
The problem
The strange but irritating fact is that there are a lot of perfectly legitimate tax allowances in Australia across all business sectors, and very few people ever bother to investigate their options. That’s quite a problem, and the baffling thing is that for anyone who’s done small business accounting the basic ideas of tax minimization are pretty obvious.
For example:
- Every business has an effective tax rate. The amount of tax paid is defined by the gross tax payable less allowances and deductions.
- So consider a situation where a huge range of allowances and deductions are never claimed. Ridiculous, isn’t it?
- Now consider the fact that these allowances generally average around 8-15% of the total tax bill and can be quite a lot higher depending on business accounting practices, the industry involved and the type of business activity. The situation has gone from ridiculous to utterly absurd.
It really is rather grotesque. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) can’t be accused of keeping these allowances and entitlements a secret, either. The ATO, in fact, goes to notable lengths to make sure businesses are able to access information about these entitlements. The trouble is they don’t. Australian businesses are doing themselves no favours with their taxes.
The solution
Actually, if you’re doing business in Australia, you can get all the help you need with your taxes with a phone call to professional tax consultants. The magic words here are “tax minimization”, and they don’t means some idiotic tax evasion scam. They refer to fully customized “designer” tax management programs.
Tax minimization is actually two processes:
- Taking advantage of all the entitlements and allowances applying to a business. This process involves a truly detailed, fully researched study of the business and creation of a working operational methodology to ensure the business claims everything it’s entitled.
- Developing the first process to create an optimum level of taxation. This may involve some alterations to how business transactions are recorded (most businesses don’t even know how to record their legitimate expenses properly for tax purposes) and in some cases industry-specific practices to take advantage of tax benefits.
To give a slightly horrifying, but appropriate description- Many businesses don’t even know that the apps on their business phone systems can create quite a range of tax entitlements. If you’ve got mobile EFTPOS, ecommerce or other functions on your business phones, you’re quite literally staring at extra tax entitlements. That’s how basic, and how thorough, tax consultants can be about finding tax benefits.
Do your business a favour- talk to professional tax consultants about tax minimization, and talk to the ATO. You’ll find they’re very much on the same page.
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