There has been a raft of legislative change recently introduced which will affect businesses when it becomes effective.

At present we are just flagging the changes to you without going too deeply into detail. That said, let’s sketch in how it’s looking.

Provisional Tax

The provisional tax changes mentioned last year will apply from 1 April 2018. These include the proposed accounting income method (AIM) of paying provisional tax.

While current methods for calculating and paying provisional tax will still be available, AIM proposes that you pay provisional tax from your accounting software, where you are a business with less than $5m annual gross income.

AIM capable software will calculate provisional tax owing throughout the year and enable you to pay provisional tax direct to Inland Revenue. So the year-end tax return becomes more about verifying payments made through the year and making any adjustments or corrections needed.

This could work well for new businesses in particular. Currently, a new business doesn’t have to worry about tax in its first year. But when it enters its second year, it has to meet not only its tax obligations for that second year but also its provisional tax for the following year. This is something of a double whammy businesses struggle with.

With AIM, new businesses would start paying tax when they start making a profit, paying instalments over the year timed to the business operating cycle.

With AIM capable software we could monitor tax paid direct from your business and contact you if we notice anomalies requiring further investigation or adjustment.

If you are interested in exploring what this method can do for your business, we can discuss how we could help you best.

Use Of Money (UOM) interest
Another part of the package of changes applying from the 2018 income year (i.e. from 1 April 2017 for standard balance date taxpayers) is to remove use of money interest from the first two provisional tax instalments (for those who pay in three instalments) and who continue to use the standard method to calculate and pay provisional tax (commonly referred to as the ‘uplift method’).

Businesses (including companies) and individuals with residual income tax of less than $60,000 and paying provisional tax in three instalments using the standard method will not be subject to use of money interest.