This week’s Federal Budget announced it would reduce more red tape, delivering $1.6 billion in savings over the next four years, streamlining cumbersome and unnecessary processes.
It is set to save alcohol and fuel companies around $20 million dollars a year in compliance costs and excise changes, with Minister Assisting the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ben Morton saying the changes would make it easier for beverage manufacturers to “do what they do best”.
“These changes deliver significant deregulation benefits for fuel and alcohol producers, importers, and distributors by streamlining cumbersome and unnecessary processes.
“This includes simplifying licensing arrangements, removing overlapping tax administration at the border, and better aligning excise payments with other taxes paid by small businesses,” Morton said.
Morton said the package was developed after consultation with industry leaders and business owners and would remove inefficient administrative and compliance requirements.
Agenda Measures
From 1 July 2023, some of the deregulation changes will be:
- enable fuel and alcohol businesses with an annual turnover of less than $50 million to lodge and pay excise and excise-equivalent customs duty on a quarterly basis, rather than the current weekly or monthly requirement;
- enable businesses that import fuel and alcohol products for further manufacture or distribution and want to defer payment of excise or excise-equivalent customs duty, to transfer the fuel or alcohol straight into a warehouse administered by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) once the products have gone through Australian Border Force (ABF) customs clearance. The ABF will still collect tax on direct imports;
- streamline and align licensing requirements across the excise system, by:
- removing all renewal requirements for excise and excise-equivalent customs goods licences; removing licence fees; enabling the ATO and ABF to issue entity-level licences in addition to site-level licences; and providing blanket permission to move goods between sites controlled by licensed businesses;
- removing onshore producers of crude oil and condensate from the excise system until and unless they exceed the relevant production threshold to be liable for excise payments;
- extending the time limit to apply for a refund of excise overpayments from 12 months to 4 years after payment, to align with refunds of customs duty;
- creating a public register of excise and excise-equivalent customs goods licences administered by the ATO. - amend the excise law to provide a targeted exemption from excise licensing requirements, up to a threshold of 10,000 litres per year, for licensed hospitality venues to fill beer from kegs into sealed, non-pressurised containers of no more than 2 litres capacity and not designed for medium- to long-term storage (‘growlers’).
For more information on the Deregulation Agenda, click here.
