The superannuation industry is continuing to complain that the Federal Government has unjustly imposed the developmental costs of its new SuperStream arrangements on superannuation funds, when other sectors will also benefit.
The industry's continuing discontent at the Government's approach is revealed in a new submission to Treasury by the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA), in which it points to other beneficiaries including major employers, self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs) and government departments, but they are not being asked to carry any of the cost.
"We note that the cost of providing these enabling services will be met through the SuperStream Levy which is being imposed on all Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) regulated superannuation funds," the submission said.
"In this context, ASFA would like to raise its concerns about the lack of transparency over the actual costs of the various components of SuperStream and the allocation of all of the costs to APRA regulated funds," the submission said.
It said that the most amount of detail APRA-regulated funds have been able to obtain is contained in an Australian Taxation Office document on SuperStream that states that provision of the validation services will cost $60 million ($57 million in IT costs and $3 million in non-IT costs).
"ASFA considers that this level of detail is insufficient to enable the industry, which is paying for the delivery of two separate services, to understand where the actual costs lie," the submission said.
"Separately we note that one of the enabling services will be used to enable employers to check the personal information provided to them by employees," it said.
"ASFA would argue that, whilst this service will assist superannuation funds, it will also assist employers and deliver benefits to the Government with respect to the accuracy of tax-related employment information."
The submission said that, in this context, "ASFA questions the reasoning behind the totality of the development costs being levied against APRA-regulated superannuation funds with no component being recovered from employers and self-managed superannuation funds or carried by the Commonwealth despite those parties benefiting from the service".
