Our SMSF auditing service
We offer a fast service that is clearly independent and at an attractive cost due to our semi paperless audit process.
We believe we are Perth’s largest SMSF auditor and our scale and inward investment allows us to do a professional job reliably at the right cost.
We can either invoice you or the client directly – your choice.
Our turnaround can be agreed as either 2 or 3 weeks, and can we can often do one-off urgent audits where needed.
We have an “audit run” we do every three weeks collecting and dropping off physical files, you can join this service if you are near the current route.
We also have a portal you can use to lodge scanned files and we accept emailed audit work to cut costs and speed up turnaround times.
Most volume audits are around $550 if electronically received, and we offer a free telephone advice service to you (not your clients) to help avoid problems at audit time. Most Accountants have less than 1% qualifications, however where these do occur time is increased and our fees in these limited circumstances would be:
- Management Letter $80.00
- Qualification $80.00 plus
- Contravention $100.00
Using us takes away any question of independence in SMSF auditing, which is enforceable if you’re a sole practitioner with CPA.
Contact us to find out more and note if we do your SMSF audits you can join our SMSF authorised representative scheme and continue advising on SMSFs
Our SMSF Authorised Representative offering
Becoming a limited Authorised Representative (AR) and continuing SMSF advising/setup.
We offer the AR option to firms who will use us as SMSF auditors and who want to continue offering SMSF solutions to their clients after 1st July 2016.
After this date accountants have 4 choices – we are offering option 1, the easy cheap solution which allows you to keep offering SMSF solutions.
1. Be a limited authorised representative with us as licensee, having done a partial RG146 qualification, and you can continue offering SMSF advice and setup/closure of SMSF’s for your clients, using our template-driven statements of advice to make things easy and compliant. You do not become a full financial planner, and must refer more complex planning to fully qualified planners. This need not be our planners – your choice.
2. Become a full financial planner as an authorised rep of a 3rd party licensee, doing a full RG146 qualification, but we consider this is incompatible with continuing as an accountant due to the amount of continuing professional development to keep up with and the admin/compliance regime required. We consider it difficult to provide an adequate service of both tax/accounting and being a full financial planner as a sole practitioner.
3. Become a full or limited financial planner with your own partial or full license ( Australian Financial Services License) – this option requires a lot of initial and on-going expenditure on compliance and management of the license and only suits firms with a large number of financial planners on board to justify running the license. A partial license is still quite a responsibility and cost, and you need to source your own PI without group discounts.
4. Do nothing. You are very restricted to only stating the law and not doing anything whatsoever that could reasonably influence the decision by a client to purchase a financial product, this could be as something a simple as increasing the level of contributions. You may lose some accounting clients as they move their accounting to whoever is acting for them advising on their SMSF. Your accounting PI will not cover you on any financial planning issues as you are no longer allowed to give such advice, the Insurers will certainly be looking at claims involving SMSFs very closely. A link to CPA website which gives a full description of what you are allowed to do – and no longer allowed to do – is available on our website, where there is lots of free SMSF related information.
You can view the CPA SMSF can/can’t do checklist via This Link Here
OPTION 1 – BECOMING AN AFS LICENSED SMSF ADVISER (A LIMITED AR)
To take up option 1 and become a SMSF Authorised Representative, you need to take the following steps:
A. Get the required education, a partial RG146. Holding a CPA, CA or IPA practicing certificate exempts you from some of the qualification.
There is lots of confusion on what is required, the CPA use Kaplan for training which takes a long time and costs a lot.
We use 2 different RG146 ASIC registered training organisations who offer 2 day courses, or online courses at about $1000
B. Apply to us – complete the Authorised Representative application form with identity check and similar. etc.
C. Sign our Authorised Representative agreements and get our templates for keeping your advice compliant.
On-going commitments:
i. We audit your files randomly
ii. You do 15CPD points annually – any recognised points, we do not require a set provider such as Kaplan
iii. You continue to be insurable by our insurance provider
Costs – The limited authorised representative option is currently only available to our auditing clients – feel free to become one if you are not yet!
We are currently charging $2900 plus gst per year including insurance for the first AR in an office, and offer discounts for additional ARs from the same physical office.
