About MTAS changes for trustees
We're making changes to trust reporting to:
- reduce red tape
- streamline workflows
- reduce overall compliance costs.
We're also aiming to improve the information you'll report in your trust tax return to:
- provide greater transparency
- enable more targeted compliance
- reduce unnecessary contact with us.
By changing the information that you'll include in the statement of distribution and enabling it to be available to beneficiaries in pre-fill, we'll improve their ability to report correctly.
What to expect in Tax Time 2026
When preparing your trust tax return for 2025–26, you'll notice a change to the labels in the statement of distribution section of your trust tax return. We’re adding 3 labels:
- B1 Non-primary production managed investment scheme amount.
- U2 Franked distribution related to investments amount.
- H1 Other assessable foreign source income from a financial investment amount.
These new labels will:
- improve your ability to notify beneficiaries of their entitlement to income
- support the calculation of their Net financial investment loss at IT5 in their tax return.
We recommend you provide beneficiaries with a copy of the trust statement of distribution where it relates to their entitlement to trust income. Lodging your trust tax return as early as possible can also help your individual beneficiaries to prepare their return, particularly where they lodge via myTax or through a different tax agent to the trust.
Behind the scenes, we're improving lodgment checks by identifying common errors and helping you and your tax agent get it right. You'll need to submit less additional information separately than before when lodging the trust tax return form. These changes will:
- simplify lodgment requirements
- reduce our need to contact you about the trust tax return
- improve processing times.
Coming up in Tax Time 2027
We'll be updating the 2027 trust tax return with additional labels that support the legislated changes to beneficiary reporting for closely held trusts.
The requirement for you to send us a TFN report after a beneficiary quotes their TFN to you no longer applies from 1 July 2026. This includes any prior year TFN reports not lodged as at this date.
Instead, you must report the beneficiary's TFN in the statement of distribution when you complete your 2027 trust tax return.
This does not change your TFN withholding and reporting obligations where the beneficiary's TFN hasn't been quoted before the payment of any distributions.
We'll include additional labels in the 2027 trust tax return to support this change:
- Trust’s details: Is the trust a closely-held trust?
- Statement of distribution (for each beneficiary): tax file number (TFN) not provided by beneficiary.
Coming up in Tax Time 2028
There'll be further changes in the 2028 trust tax return, including:
- new labels planned for the statement of distribution
- improvements to the layout of the trust tax return and trust income schedule
- other reporting changes aimed at streamlining the processing of trust returns and improving transparency.