I received a letter from the Commonwealth Bank in January this year saying they would refund me $1758.33 in fees because I never received any service for them (looking at the fine print, it appears to be because they did not send me the correct paperwork notifying me of the fees). This was for a financial adviser they had bought out. They would send the money to IOOF. I rolled my super out of IOOF in 2020.

I emailed IOOF in April asking what happened to the money. I got no response. In July they sent a letter saying they were sending $1706.78 to the ATO. No mention of where the $52 difference went.

A week ago $1462.77 turned up in my SMSF bank account. Today I got a notification via the SMSF online portal from the ATO advising me they sent it. Again, no explanation of where the missing $300 went, however they do split it up into $10.98 of untaxable and $1459.71 of taxed money, which is 1706.78 minus 14.4% - close to the tax rate of 15% on super. It was a scanned document that looked like it had been scanned on a 20 year old scanner.

Can anyone make sense of this? Did the missing money disappear into administration fees? Did the ATO tax the refund?

My wife had a similar scenario ... her boss pays super to his super account provider instead of that selected by his emplyees, and they are supposed to act like a clearing house and forward the super onto each emplyees preferred super fund .... in my wifes case that's Hesta. For about the last 6 months they have conveniently forgotten to forward it but that's now been sorted. Instead, now we have a scenario where for some reason, from when it leaves his account to when it gets to hers, the amounts are always less. Hesta is saying they haven't applied fee's the the amounts yet and the balance shown is all they have received. I've told her to escalate it .. if her boss wants to use a clearing house HE needs to pay any fees from his provider, not her.

AusGeoff wrote on Aug 31^st, 2022 at 6:16am:


it won't matter ... she gave notice yesterday