LAND TAX CHANGES

Have you received a letter from Revenue SA about land tax changes?  If you have don’t ignore it.  Providing the right information and documents to Revenue SA now may save you lots of money, and failing to do so is likely to cost you even more.

If you are the trustee of a trust and the trust owns land subject to land tax (eg. a residential investment property) it is particularly important that you respond to the letter.  Under the previous system a trust could own up to $391,000 in land value without any tax being payable.  Under the new system the threshold is reduced to $25,000 so almost every trust-held property is potentially taxable.  In many cases however if you do what is required now you still won’t have to pay any tax.  For “discretionary” or “family” trusts this may involve nominating one person to be the effective land tax owner – but who to appoint?  That needs to be thought through carefully, as appointing the wrong person may cause you grief (in the form of big land tax bills) later on.

We recommend that you seek advice from us if you have received a land tax letter.  Dealing with this properly is not necessarily an expensive matter, but it can have big benefits.