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The Australian’s IT section has just run an article (quoting Simon Ellis, our Senior Tax Advisor) outlining the salary packaging industry’s general response to the question of iPad packaging. The article makes clear that the industry is broadly following SmartSalary’s lead, and exercising a fair amount of caution before adding iPads to the menu of available packaging items.
As the article notes, it is only where an individual‘s employment duties involve regular tasks requiring access to an iPad (or similar machine) that the ATO will accept salary packaging. We interpret this to mean that the ATO is not going to test packaging arrangements by looking at the actual use of the machine – it’s going to test them by looking at your ordinary employment duties, and deciding whether those duties justify access to an iPad.
Simon tells me that this approach is consistent with ATO guidelines on laptops, as set out in ATO ID 2008/127.
Thus SmartSalary’s cautious approach to packaging iPads seems to have been warranted. We will, of course, continue to liaise with our employer clients in this regard but for the time being iPads are likely to stay off the menu for many of our packaging customers.
