Before lodging your client's tax returns you should consider the following, as processing may be delayed if there are incorrect or incomplete details in returns:
- Understand that a low income earner may need to lodge despite their income being below the tax-free threshold.
- Check for fraudulent payment summaries.
- Work out how tax residency status and foreign income affects tax payable in Australia.
- To claim the Medicare levy exemption, clients need to obtain a statement from Services Australia.
- Ensure work-related expense claims are correct and meet the rules.
- Ensure your clients provide all their income, as we use data-matching against third-party data.
- Check whether they have earned income through the sharing economy.
- Check and update the business industry code reported if the client's business has changed purpose.
- Understand why a client record could be inactive and the circumstances in which we will reactivate a client record.
- Use the pre-filling service to check information is accurate, understand what data is and isn't available and find out about known data issues.
- Help prevent delays in processing returns by checking for common errors before lodging.