Did you receive an OMARA email in about September 2013 setting out that GST is no longer payable on your registration fee? Few RMAs seem to recall this let alone realise the effective fee hike. Some may now have also potentially and wrongly claimed an input tax credit. 

Many RMAs are calling this change by OMARA a covert fee hike and going directly against calls made by the Migration Alliance to half the current registration fees so that they were closer to other professions like tax agents and medical professionals.

IN THE COURSE OF PREPARING YOUR LAST TAX RETURNS you may not have noticed the OMARA tax invoice for repeat registration application states: “GST is not payable on registration application fees”. Previous such invoices however show that GST applied to registration application fees. The difference of these statements is that you could be out of pocket by the GST amount (depending on the type of registration you have).

An MA member recently queried the OMARA’s chief executive Steve Ingram on the matter:

“If this situation has changed, I would like to know why I am still being charged the same amount as if the GST was included,” the RMA asked citing that the change would mean that RMAs are effectively left out of pocket by $145 from now on.

OMARA pretty much threw the book at the RMA in its response stating that the OMARA has the right under legislation to charge same fee irrespective of whether GST applies:

“The fees payable for making a registration application are set out in the Migration Agents Registration Application Charge Regulations 1998.  Regulation 4 prescribes a commercial /for profit fee of $1760 for initial applicants and $1595 for repeat applicants.  Regulation 5 prescribes a non-commercial/non-profit fee of $160 for initial applicants and $105 for repeat applicants. These are the charges that are payable on making a registration application irrespective of whether GST applies.”

The email explains further that: The practical effect of this change is that before 1 October 2013, the Authority was remitting 1/11 of all revenue from the collection of the application charge to the Australian Taxation Office and the remainder to consolidated revenue.  From 1 October 2013, all application fees collected by the Authority will be remitted to consolidated revenue.  There will be no change to the fees paid by applicants for registration as a migration agent.  Those agents who are registered for GST purposes will no longer be able to claim an input tax credit for application fees paid on or after 1 October 2013.

This information was apparently sent out in an email to all RMAs in about September 2013. The Migration Alliance would like to know if all RMAs actually received this notice because a straw poll indicates that no one remembers receiving it. The OMARA really needed to have done better to work with RMAs on this matter. Additional publicity around the matter would have helped avoid the suggestion that this was a covert fee hike by the OMARA.

The OMARA collects over $5 million in agent registration fees each year. Migration Alliance has told the federal government that much of the $5 million its members paid in registration fees was used for "featherbedding" bureaucrats at the authority at a rate inconsistent with the organisation's duties.

Last year Assistant Immigration Minister Michaelia Cash announced a review into the authority, a discrete unit attached to the department.

The Migration Alliance is lobbying as best as it can to ensure that there will be a shake up of the authority in order that the OMARA starts working better with the members of the professional migration advisory industry.

The Migration Alliance in a submission to the review complained about a lack of transparency regarding the management of the authority's finances and the awarding of expensive contracts and what it called "the promiscuous sharing of information about the business affairs and conduct of Australian citizens”

"The staff numbers have increased from 12 persons when the operation was run by the (Migration Institute of Australia), to now 39 persons, with no discernible improvement in the quality of service to consumers," Migration Alliance's submission to the review said…"As a point of comparison we draw your attention to the Office of the NSW Legal Services Commissioner annual report. The wages and salaries are around the same level as expended by OMARA but there are ten-times the number of lawyers supervised by the LSC.”