Future Changes for PAY-PACK

Future Changes for PAY-PACK

There will be big changes to Payment Summaries for payments made in the financial year starting 1 July 2006. Later this calendar year we will produce a new version of PAY-PACK to incorporate these changes.

All these changes relate to the financial year ending 30 June 2007. The rules for the Payment Summaries for the financial year ending 30 June 2006 are the same as for the previous few years, and are implemented in PAY-PACK version 8.0 series.

The Payment Summary will have a quite different appearance.
The employer will only need to give one page to each employee. This will be the Payee’s Personal Records Copy.
The employee will not need to include a copy of the Payment Summary with the Tax Return!!!
The ATO no longer requires the extensive “NOTICE TO PAYEE” printed out on the Payee’s Personal Records Copy.
There will be free-form white space on the Payment Summary, where details of Allowances and Deductions can be printed.

As employer you will have to send the information to the ATO electronically using the ECI method. The ATO will no longer accept data mailed on disks. (Please note these changes are for payments in next financial year. The ATO will still accept data on disks over the next few months for payments made up until 30 June 2006.)

Transitional arrangements. You can still use the existing Payment Summary format for any that you have to print up until 31 January 2007.

New Version of PAY-PACK

We will produce a new version of PAY-PACK to meet these new requirements. We will include other changes to PAY-PACK, many of which have been suggested by customers.

The new version of PAY-PACK will not print to the ATO forms. Our experience is that every year they change the form slightly, and this puts the printing out of alignment. Only a handful of our customers are printing Payment Summaries on ATO forms. Most of these will be able to use the self-print method, but an employer with only a few employees could hand-write the details onto the ATO form. The ATO has made it very clear that they prefer self-print Payment Summaries.

We expect to send the new version to most of our customers between October and December 2006. Please let us know if you require it earlier.