Microtax 2020 notes

Some of the main changes in Microtax 2020 as specified by the ATO are as follows:

Form EI:
• New Income Details Schedule (ID), with the following sections:
— PAYG payments – Australian & exempt foreign employment
— PAYG payments – Foreign employment income
— Employment termination payments (ETP)
— Australian government benefits
— Australian annuities & superannuation income streams (SIS)
— Australian superannuation lump sums (SLS)
— Attributed personal services income (PSI)
— Gross interest
— Dividends
— Employee share schemes (ESS)
— Foreign employment income non-payment summaries
— Foreign entities
— Foreign pensions or annuities
— Other foreign income
— Early stage offsets (non-managed fund)
— Managed fund distributions
— Partnership distributions
— Trust distributions
— Business income statements and payment summaries
— Other income
• New data fields in the Rental Property Schedule (RP):
— Ownership percentage
— Total income amounts, with the client share amounts automatically calculated

Form ET:
• New data fields:
— Item 2G2: “Country by country reporting entity”
— New section 32: “Non-Concessional Managed Investment Trust Income (NCMI)”
— NCMI fields added to section 56 “Statement of Distribution”

Form EP:
• New data fields:
— Item 2G2: “Country by country reporting entity”
— New section 32: “Non-Concessional Managed Investment Trust Income (NCMI)”
— NCMI fields added to section 52 “Statement of Distribution”

Form EC:
• New data fields:
— Item 3G2: “Country by country reporting entity”

We suggest you study the facsimile and tagged facsimile documents in the Microtax Manual to become familiar with these changes.

Enhancements

In addition to the above changes, this release includes the following enhancements:

All forms:
• Fields which receive their data from other parts of the return (including schedules) can’t be edited, and this has long been the case in Microtax. However, we often noticed that people couldn’t tell whether a field was read-only or read-write, leading to confusion. The new Income Details Schedule (ID) in form EI is used to replace a large number of input data fields, so this problem has become even more noticeable in Microtax 2020. Accordingly, we have updated all parts of Microtax to display read-only fields with a light yellow background, making read-only fields immediately obvious.

Form EI:
• The new Income Details Schedule (ID) has so many sections that it can be a little difficult to select the correct one. So we have added the new Schedules QuikLinx, which works like the existing QuikLinx. Both appear on screen automatically when you select form EI from the Main Control Module.
— If you don’t like this behaviour, you can turn it off in the Maintain System Parameters module. Select “Global” and then “General Microtax Parameters” and then set “Disable auto Schedules QuikLinx” to Yes.