Close to 60 per cent of medium to large businesses find their choice of fund process cumbersome and costly due to the labour intensive tasks involved, according to a joint survey by super clearing service specialist SuperChoice and The Association for Payroll Specialists (TAPS).
The research comes at a time when the Federal Government is focused on reducing employer costs and burdensome administration tasks that are required to meet superannuation guarantee and choice obligations.
The survey identified the key issues for improving superannuation choice processes as standardising remittance and reporting formats for all choice transactions, electronic funds transfer (EFT) as a mandatory payment method and the prompt return of rejected payments to employers
SuperChoice chief executive officer Peter Philip said employers were spending tens of thousands of dollars annually to administer choice, with particularly high impacts for employers with large numbers of employees and/or with high staff turnover.
“Medium to large businesses are spending $25 per employee annually to administer choice — this relates to both the human resource and non human costs of administering and delivering the payments,” he said.
“We were greatly encouraged by the fact employers using clearing services more than halved their cost and time associated with superannuation choice administration. We think this time and cost saving can go a long way further as scale and efficiency increase,” he said.
TAPs general manager Jason Low said: “We realise there’s an argument that the human resource cost is a sunk cost, but tell that to the payroll managers who get in at 7am and stay back till 7pm to process cheques to 50 super funds with different requirements and formats,” he said.
According to Low, there were some straightforward things for the Government to work on almost immediately.
“The idea that a large number of super funds want employers to register with them because one employee chooses the fund is a very significant time-waster for payroll. If the Government really wants to cut red-tape for business, this needs to go.”
