BGL Corporate Solutions, developer of Australia’s leading SMSF administration and ASIC corporate compliance solutions, calls on ASIC to remove misleading SMSF are not for everyone flyer and all references to this document from its website.
“I find it amazing that ASIC continues to quote the totally discredited document” said BGL’s Managing Director Ron Lesh. “Now that we all have the same data that ASIC had in 2019, it is evident ASIC cherry picked the data to scare consumers. This seems to be the way some governments may operate in Australia, but we expect better from our statutory authorities”
“ASICs calculation of $13,900 as the average cost of running an SMSF each year is absolute rubbish and is totally discredited by the latest ATO statistics” noted Lesh. “We now know ASIC included a whole lot of expenses that are not incurred and will probably never be incurred by most SMSFs.”
The expenses included in ASIC’s calculation were:
- Interest expense within Australia
- Interest expense overseas
- Insurance Premiums
- SMSF Auditor Fee
- Investment Expenses
- Management and Admin Expenses
- Forestry managed investment scheme
- Supervisory Levy
- Other Deductions
Yet the ONLY expenses common to ALL SMSFs are:
- SMSF Auditor Fee
- Management and Admin Expenses
- Supervisory Levy
“ASIC should know this” according to Lesh. “Yet they deliberately published figures. If they did not know the data was misleading, they should have!”
BGL has completed a detailed analysis of the latest ATO data to try to determine the real cost of running an SMSF. And results are starkly different from the ASIC flyer. Based on the ATO’ latest data, the median cost of running an SMSF including ONLY the expenses common to all SMSFs ranges from $1,639 for a fund with assets of less than $50,000 to $3,934 for a fund with assets between $1m and $2. Funds with assets over $2m cost less to run than funds with assets between $1m and $2.
“The median common expenses for all funds is $3,322 “added Lesh. This is vastly different from ASIC’s $13,900. BGL’s analysis was of 2017-18 financial year data but this data does not differ significantly from the data used by ASIC from 2016-17 financial year. ASIC’s argument they used the best data available is probably correct – it’s how they spun the data that is grossly misleading”
“It is time for ASIC to come clean and withdraw its misleading, SMSFs are not for everyone, flyer” Lesh said. “And to also remove all references to this flyer and its data from ASIC’s websites”
