If you cannot afford to pay your BAS… don’t panic. You’re neither the first, nor the last to be in this situation. I’ll walk you through some key steps on what you can do to avoid problems.
Lodge your BAS on time
The first thing is to make sure all your BAS are lodged on time, regardless of whether you can pay it or not, put your forms in on time. If they are in on time you can stop yourself from becoming personally liable down the track.
Second thing is, if you don’t lodge them on time, they locked down the laws in 2012, which means you are personally liable before you can put the company into administration and walk away.
Now, if you haven’t lodged things on time, you will be personally liable.
If it’s less than $20,000
If you cannot pay your BAS, there’s no problem. Lodge your forms and do a deal with the ATO. If it’s less than $20,000 you don’t even talk to an individual.
You just do it over the phone. You work out a payment plan and you go forward. If you owe more than $20k, there’s no problem.
Ring them up, do a deal, they are very lenient if you’re on the front foot. If it‘s hundreds of thousands of dollars, they will ask for a cash flow, a balance sheet, and a profit or loss. If it is less than that, they will do a deal, so long as you keep the deal up to date.
Keeping your deal up to date is the most important thing you can do. People trust you because you keep those payments.
If you don’t keep them up to date, you can change it, but call them before the due date, they’ll work with you, but if you do it after the due date, forget it.
Nobody believes you, nobody trusts you. So keep your deals up to date.