Read on for a Jobpac Connect legislative compliance hot topic round-up including STP Phase 2 status.
Payment Times Reporting
Introduced with the Payment Times Reporting (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2020, the bill establishes a Payment Times Reporting Scheme which requires qualifying businesses to biannually report on their payment terms and practices for their small business suppliers. The scheme aims to improve payment outcomes for small businesses by creating transparency around the payment practices from large businesses to small business suppliers. First half reports can be submitted from 1st July and no later than end of September 2021 through the PTRS Portal.
Jobpac Connect’s new PTRS Report moves into Beta Test phase on Monday 26th July. We hope to move through Beta testing as quickly as possible with participating customers and will update you all again when the new PTRS Report becomes generally available.
More information on Payment Times Reporting can be found here:
NSW SC Retention Held in Trust Reporting
Recent Amendments to the NSW Building and Construction Industry Security of Payment Regulations 2020 include updates around Trust Account Records which can be found here
The new SC Retention Statements feature is now generally available and allows you to generate individual Subcontractor remittance style statements that can be emailed directly to qualified Subcontractors from Jobpac, on a quarterly basis or as often as you wish. The distribution of Subbie Statements operates off the back of the current SC Retention Held in Trust Reconciliation Report. The idea being that once you have reconciled you can then run the same report, for the same date range, in “Subbie Statement mode” to email out nicely formatted complying statements.
QLD Project Trust Accounts (PTA’s)
Project bank accounts started in Queensland on 1 March 2018 under the Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017. Designed to protect payments for contractors working on building and construction projects, the first phase of these accounts applied to government building projects valued between $1 million and $10 million.
An independent review of the first phase of project bank accounts noted the framework was effective but recommended a number of improvements. As a result, changes to the BIF Act were made in 2020 to introduce a new trust account framework.
Development to further streamline the administration of payments for PBA’s and the new PTA’s is underway. The existing PBA Reconciliation report will work for PTA Reconciliation in exactly the same way, so it is not expected that any changes will be needed for PTA’s at the reconciliation level. However, we do want to improve administration around payments from multiple project-based cash accounts to support both our QLD and WA customers through modifications that will benefit our entire customer base. Although development is already underway for early stages, we are still accepting feedback from customers who wish to contribute to final design.
STP Phase 2
STP Phase 2 development is currently on track for the ATO mandated deadline of Jan 1st 2022. We expect to move into ECT Test phase with the Digital Partnership Office (DPO) in Mid September. We will keep you updated throughout the second half of this year.
