Summary – The Assistant Treasurer has issued a further Exposure Draft on proposed legislation restating and standardizing special conditions for tax concession charities including Map of Australiathe “In Australia” conditions.

The Assistant Treasurer has now released a further Exposure Draft of legislation restating and standardising special conditions for tax concession entities and, in particular, refining the “In Australia” special conditions.

Under the current law, tax concession charities and deductible gift recipients have different requirements concerning their obligations to operate “In Australia” to access tax concessions.Continue Reading In Australia Tax Concession Requirements Reviewed

Speaker at ConferenceSummary – Bill d’Apice and Kylie Maxwell presented to the NSW State Legal Conference on NFP structures and the reform agenda for charities and NFPs on 27 March 2012.

Bill d’Apice and Kylie Maxwell both gave presentations to many lawyers and sector representatives at the request of organisers of the NSW State Legal Conference. They addressed current issues affecting Charities and Not-For-Profits in relation to entity structures, public juridical persons, changes to the laws affecting Public Ancillary Funds, the proposed unrelated business income tax, proposals concerning “In Australia” requirements for certain entities and possible changes to governance requirements with the upcoming Australian Charities & Not-For-Profits Commission.Continue Reading NSW State Legal Conference

Kylie Maxwell presenting at the Netball NSW 2012 ConferenceSummary – Makinson & d’Apice Lawyers presented at the 4th Biennial Netball NSW Conference.

On the sunny morning of Saturday, 25 February 2012, Kylie Maxwell and I gave presentations to attendees of the 4th Biennial Netball NSW Conference at Sydney Olympic Park.  The Conference was organised by Netball NSW and we were honoured to

SUMMARY The New Zealand Charities Commission is to be disestablished due to a duplication of government functions, while Australia is setting up its Australian Charities & Not-For-Profits Commission.

Charities and Not-For-Profit organisations in Australia will be interested to know that while the Federal Government is setting up the Australian Charities and Not-For-Profits Commission (which is

The Federal Government has been working on the reform of the Charities and Not-For-Profit sector arduously before the Christmas break.

The Government has recently released 4 discussion papers and drafts for comment and passed legislation on issues affecting Not-For-Profit organisations and Charities.

In particular, the Government has released:

There was a flurry of activity in relation to tax provisions in the first half of 2011.  As a result the Government appears to be fully occupied digesting the numerous comments provided by charities and NFPs, their advisors and the broader community. The following tax related issues have received attention:

For a new tax that has not received much NFP support the UBIT certainly has NFPs concerned
  • The Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT). UBIT seeks to tax the non‑core income of charities which is not applied for their altruistic purposes.  Even though the UBIT tax was announced by the treasurer as being effective in some cases on 1 July 2011, the rules are still unknown!  We understand there were a significant number of submissions lodged and they overwhelmingly rejected the tax.  In fact, we have not been able to identify a submission supporting the proposed tax.

View our submission (pdf).

In our view:

    • the UBIT is unlikely to raise significant revenue.
    • there have also been no examples of significant abuse of the existing system.
    • furthermore, the existence of a UBIT will undoubtedly result in significant additional administrative expenses to charities and NFPs distracting them from their principal altruistic purposes.
    • this is an unnecessary and bad tax.
      Continue Reading Tax Reform for Charities: UBIT is Coming