Fringe Benefits Tax

ATO Fringe Benefits Tax

Many families in business typically see Fringe Benefits Tax as a “bad” thing. However, a creative tax strategy to your employment can help a business use fringe benefits tax to engage and motivate staff members. Alternatively, the good use of systems and technology can streamline repetitive tasks and free up the internal finance team to do more profitable work rather than completing fringe benefits tax returns.

In essence, a fringe benefits tax is an employment tax. And our fringe benefits tax calculators are essential in understanding how the cost of fringe benefits tax impacts an employee’s remuneration package when modelling your HR and employment cost. At Westcourt, we freely make available FBT calculators to assist our clients in making a cost-benefit approach to fringe benefits tax.

Westcourt Perspective

Westcourt understands that fringe benefits tax should be viewed as a total tax cost by looking at payroll tax, workers compensation insurance costs, super guarantee levy and the administrative costs of Single Touch Payroll.

Fringe Benefits Tax Applications

Motor vehicle fringe benefits
Car parking fringe benefits
Entertainment fringe benefits

Debt waiver fringe benefits
Loan fringe benefits
Housing fringe benefits

Board fringe benefits
Property fringe benefits
Living away from Home Allowances

Expense payment fringe benefits
Car leasing fringe benefits
Residual fringe benefits

It is our deep expertise and single focus on emerging + middle market family businesses that gives us an edge in identify fringe benefits tax exemptions and technology to streamline systems that allows us to create true value and applying exemptions properly.

Further, avoiding fringe benefits tax can be appealing, but not all benefits can be avoided. So clear fringe benefits tax governance, systems, elections and records are needed to ensure that your private business can safely and adequately comply with the FBT regulations, including payroll tax, STP reporting, BAS preparation, and superannuation guarantee legislation.

In some instances, like employee share plans, the use and integration of fringe benefits tax law to the share plan can create an unusual outcome with no fringe benefits tax and no income tax to the employee.