While most businesses are already familiar with the Single Touch Payroll (STP) regime, small employers (19 or fewer employees) with closely held payees were exempt from reporting payroll information of those closely held payees through the STP for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 financial years. However, from 1 July 2021, those small employers must start reporting payments made to closely held payees through STP.
In essence, closely held payees consists of individuals that are directly related to the entity from which they receive payments including family members in a family business, directors or shareholders of a company, and beneficiaries of a trust.
If you’re an employer with only closely held payees, you will just need to start reporting through STP from 1 July 2021, there is no need to notify the ATO of the fact that you only have closely held payees. Although, if you have both closely held payees and other employees that are at arm’s length, you will need to report information for the arm’s length employees through STP before each pay day.
To help those small businesses with only closely held payees transition to STP, the ATO has outlined a few options available from 1 July 2021 below:
Generally, the STP quarterly report for your payees will include year-to-date amounts, ordinary time earnings (OTE), super liability for each payee, total gross wages for payments being reported, and total PAYG withholding payments being reported.
If you choose to report quarterly, the report will be due on or before the due date for quarterly activity statements, and the quarterly option will not change the due dates for notifying and paying your PAYG withholding on your activity statement or making super guarantee contributions for your closely held payees.
To use the reasonable estimates method, you as an employer must report amounts equal to or greater than a percentage of gross payments and tax withheld from the latest year, across each quarter. The ATO notes that it will remit any failure to withhold penalty you may incur if you report year-to-date withholding amounts and tax withheld that is equal to or greater than 25% of the payee’s total gross payments and tax withheld from the previous finalised payment summary annual report across each quarter of the current financial year (in quarterly reports), and report and pay the tax withheld on time.
In instances where you under-estimate amounts reported for closely held employees equalling more than 25% of their total gross payments for the last financial year and did not report this through STP, the ATO notes you may be liable for penalties and interest, as well as being unable to deduct the payment for income tax purposes.
