Australian Immigration Daily News

MA has made several attempts in the recent past to alert its members about pdtraining’s offer of paying referral commissions to RMAs through a debit card option.  

The concerns of MA was also brought to the attention of pdtraining.  

A tax and legal advice from Sydney Accredited Specialist tax lawyer, David Garde of Brown Wright Stein, was also made available to MA members to keep them informed and to restrain them from using pdtraining’s GST DEFEASANCE SCHEME.  Following our proactive approach, even MIA had withdrawn its endorsement of pdtraining’s offer and stopped endorsing pdtraining as their sponsor.  This was evident from MIA’s ‘Member Benefits and Discounts Newsletter ’.  Though MIA did not publicly admit the error, MIA has stopped promoting this deal which was deemed dangerous for its members and other RMAs working in the industry.

Brown-Wright-Stein-advice-letter-to-Migration-Alliance-00904755-1.PDF

We have been advised that pdtraining continues to offer the same scheme despite concerns raised and the legal advice provided.  We would like to inform MA members that the matter has now been reported to relevant authorities including ATO, DIBP and OMARA.  MA would like to warn its members to accurately reflect any commission earnings from pdtraining in their accounting books if they have been paid any referral commission by pdtraining.  Any audit of pdtraining’s scheme may give rise to further audits of businesses to whom such referral commissions have been paid.  Though MA is not responsible for how individual RMAs maintain their accounts, we would like to take a proactive approach in safeguarding the interest of our members being a responsible member organisation with the largest membership. 

The complaint to relevant authorities about pdtraining’s offer highlighted the following issues:

•        Unfairly attracting businesses in a way which is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive;
•        Leverages the advantage gained from their offering by making it look like scheme participants do not have to pay tax on what pdtraining gives them.
•        pdtraining offers commissions fulfilled by a debit card provider.  The idea of the scheme is to recast commissions paid to migration agents as gifts, or at least to look like gifts, and to leverage the advantages of that approach.
•       A copy of the tax and legal advice from Sydney lawyers, Brown Wright Stein, was also sent to the authorities with comments that:

o   providing rewards for referrals by way of gift cards does not legally change the reward from commissions to gifts:

o   migration agents must account for commissions:

1.       as supplies which should be reported by them for GST etc.; and

2.       to their clients to prevent a secret commission arising.

•         Based on the comprehensive advice received, migration agents in receipt of gift card credits as their reward under the scheme should be reporting a supply and paying GST on each credit.