Businesses wanting to claim CGT concessions for active assets may find hope in a recent Full Federal Court decision on a long-contested vacant land case.

In 2007, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) ruled that vacant land on which two shipping containers had been placed for storing business records did not qualify as an “active asset” for the purposes of the CGT small business concessions.

Tax invoices are an essential element of Australia’s taxation system, and serve both to collect taxation revenue related to the goods and services on which GST is levied as well as record the credits that are claimable by eligible businesses.

New residential property is a popular investment for many, and can be especially so for self-managed superannuation funds, however the ATO is concerned that not every investor in residential property is fully aware that it is an option that may bring with it unexpected GST obligations.

The ATO has devised special rounding conventions where an amount of GST includes a fraction of a cent. Although it labels these conventions “rules”, there is no obligation for parties on either side of a transaction to follow them, as the ATO states: “You and your customer do not need to use the same rounding rules.”

We all understand that budgets are an exercise in predicting the future. Given what has happened in 2020, gazing into the crystal ball and extracting something reliable is fraught with difficulty.

The Treasury has given its best estimate, but we also need to appreciate that budgets are usually never 100% on target — that’s the nature of budgets. The question is, by how much? It will be remembered as Australia’s biggest spending budget with a forecast deficit of $214 billion for the 2021 fiscal year.