Money
Issue No. 9 - February/March 2003
Taxing Times
Tax matters - keeping you up to date
by John Rawson
Business will welcome a recent decision by the Australian Taxation Office to extend the life of Goods and Services Tax private rulings issued during the GST implementation.
Many of the original GST private rulings had a three-year life span, meaning that businesses would soon have been forced to return to the ATO for confirmation that they remained valid.
The ATO will now allow taxpayers to continue to rely on their rulings, provided certain conditions were met.
However business cannot afford to sit back, relax, and rely on the original rulings.
Since the GST implementation in 2000 there has been a considerable number of public rulings and determinations released by the ATO, with the GST legislation subject to hundreds of amendments.
The ATO has specifically stated that business taxpayers cannot rely on an existing private ruling if it has been overridden by a public GST ruling or there had been a change in the law.
All business taxpayers should revisit their private rulings to establish that they remain correct.
Once this is satisfied, businesses will not need to return automatically to the ATO if they wish to continue to rely on that ruling.
R&D START program re-opens
The Federal Government has announced that the R&D (Research and Development) START program has been re-opened. New applications for the program were suspended in April 2002, due to unprecedented demand for grant funds.
Companies with existing R&D START grants and loans were not affected by the suspension.
Importantly, there are a number of features with the R&D START program that have not changed. They include the five elements of the program—Core, Plus, Premium, Graduate and Loans—and the budget funding; the eligibility and merit criteria for the program and the application form.
Companies can still lodge their applications at any time; decisions will be made by the independent Industry Research and Develop...
