ETF - annual tax statements not even close to matching Sharesight entries

Every year I just give my accountant my AMIT statements and let him do the rest. Am I creating a problem for myself, when I reach the drawdown phase (where I will be living off sold parcels + divvies)?

Side note: I do share any stock 'sell' receipts with my accountant, but that's fairly rare and is for stock trading, not the majority which is ETF accumulation.

 

I'm not qualified to give advice of that or any other sort but can you explain what you mean by "creating a problem for yourself?"

I'm guessing you hand the relevant documents over to your accountant and don't keep them personally. I work the other way round. I retain the documents (in PDF) and provide a PDF to the accountancy firm.

 

Honestly, I never saved any dividend advice or AMIT statement in past as I do electronic tax and populate tax capital gain & income based on sharesight report.

As I am with selfwealth the buy & sell trades are sent by email so I have those in my email but I will save them on hard drive moving forward.

Lucky I just entered in market last year so only had one tax year without evidence but this year onward I will save everything now.

But honestly I don't mind ATO creates APP and I simply give them my selfwealth id so they can workout themselves my income & CG tax at the end of year.... ! I am sure government can make more money by making such app then expecting people to save physical documents... and lodge return every year... !

sharesight cost is bit high so I am now thinking to move on to navexa which is new competitor of sharesight.

 

Yes, that could happen. But will the relevant legislative bodies decide to relieve taxpayers of the duty to have supporting documentation? Now that would be a biggie.

 

I don't think they will ask you to keep physical document. The reason being that it will be very much similar to what the government do with your income. ATO never asked to show my payslip as they get the advice from employer on how much money I earned. cash in hand require proof but do you think people with cash in hand would pay tax honestly?

Selfwealth already has my TFN number and at the end of the year selfwealth will report ATO my yearly trade transaction details i.e. sell detail of the stocks and their original purchase price including brokerage paid for them.

Also, all the registry has my TFN number so they will give ATO my dividend income for the year or if I reinvested then they will give those detail as well.

All ATO needs to do is to create a program similar to what sharesight has or just buy from sharesight and when individual do their tax the ATO will auto populate income and capital gain/loss based on those information received from registry and selfwealth..... !

To make it more flexible the ATO can ask individual to opt in so basically if you OPT in then only ATO will process your details else they won't. I will OPT in first day, as we can't hide or play with electronic transaction.... !

It is feasible, just need smart politicians not the one we got at the moment.... IMO.

 

Glad to see there is complete faith in the institutions accumulating the data and confidence that errors will never occur.

 

I think whatever system you use to update this - it's safe to tie these to the AMIT statements - and also save these statements in a cloud drive like drop box/OneDrive. You never know when you need them.

When I used Sharesight I used to tick them off - but now with SimpleInvest 360 I upload them them as part of the transaction while processing, but still confirm they match original statement.

 

I guess I'm asking if there is anything I can/should be doing now, in terms of record keeping, to prepare for the drawdown phase? (besides saving annual AMIT docs)

Everything is saved in my dropbox tax filing folders.

 

new announcement of Vanguard?

Brokerage fees are great but account fees and cash management fees are show stopper...for me to leave selfwealth

https://www.vanguard.com.au/persona...al-investor-fees-changed-since-18-august-2021

 

You realise the account fees & CM fees are lower than when VPI was introduced? And the brokerage has increased?

Edit - I use SW for the trading and only have wholesale vanguard.

 

I avoid financial planners, platforms and accounting software etc as much as I can. The rules / fees can change at any time and / or the software / service provider can disappear.

Much prefer simplicity overall and avoid being "locked in" wherever possible. Eg with ETFs trade through a broker and simply keep the annual statements. This is why I love having so few holding nowdays with no complex structures other than the SMSF. And at some stage even the SMSF might be replaced with an Industry fund. When it comes to drawing down investments whether for retirement / rebalancing etc much easier to do with two rather than ten ETFs.

And for those using Sharesight / Simpleinvest 360 etc if you predecease you partner for example will he / she be confident in using or willing to take on the task.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity is my mantra nowadays. I'm sure at some stage many investors will wish they had adhered to this mantra right from the start! I know I wish I had done that.

 

I cannot think of anything beyond keeping the AMIT statements and the normal stuff (buy/sell contracts, DRP statements if you're doing that). My feeling is sometimes we tend to overcomplicate it when there is no need to. It's simple administration even more so with equities.

 

It

It is always going to be easy to use sharesight then trying to match vanguard AMIT to ATO etax form manually.

 

Feedback from one of mine on using Sharesight for tax purposes.

Give it a fail.

There are inaccuracies when, as an experiment, the transactions were reset, etc according to the instructions. For one holding, the AMIT adjustment was wrong by 10% and net amount received was out by a significant amount for another.

And also said why wait for Sharesight? Using the Annual Statements, the tax returns were submitted mid-August and tax assessment received well before Sharesight advised ETF components had even been uploaded.

 

Paraphasing Leonard Cohen ...

There's an app for everything
Thats how the errors get in

 

I just did my tax myself again this year. When I logged in all my interest income from bank, dividend from bank, franking credits of shares were all automatically pre-filled by ATO system.

To my surprise this year even vanguard dividend distribution across various categories were pre-filled by ATO so basically I didn't need to do anything. I was wrongly worried about inputting AMIT statement.

The hardest part what I first time faced was inputting share trading information (buy & sell) for the purpose of capital gain calculations and I don't believe why on earth ATO makes it so complicated for people to simply add their stock investment on the system. All they should be doing is giving us a table to fill in purchase date, sell date, purchase & sell price & brokerage but instead i need to manually input every code then save it and repeat again for every new code which was painful and ridiculous.

hope ATO reads it and next year provide simply table to input stock buy & sell figures to calculate capital gain and also workout discount on their own instead of asking people gross capital gain and then net capital gain and discount we used....complete nonsense.

 

On the matter of being required to keep records, this should clarify the matter once and for all.

INCOME TAX ASSESSMENT ACT 1997 - SECT 3.10 Your other obligations as a taxpayer

While some may not like it the legislation doesn't give a tinkers how you feel about it.

 

I guess record keeping is for buy & sell orders as dividends are already pre-filled by ATO which means they got record from the payers. correct?

 

Where does it say in the legislative requirements such documents are excluded? If you can find it, please let us know. I'll have a safe bet and have a wild guess tax payers are obligated to keep all documents relating to their tax matters. Whether or not the ATO holds similar data is irrelevant it seems.

 

Agree, legislation doesn't say it. But if they are pre-filling it that means they got it from the vanguard/banks/institution who paid the dividends. It is more like employment income which is pre-filled by ATO based on what was advised by the employer which is based on payroll tax company paid etc etc... IMO. I am not accountant but guessing those working as PAYG employee ATO won't ask them to prove income with copy of payslip so they can cross check their own pre-filled information... !