Finance Intelligence

Monday, 3 August 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Half of Australia's Charities Could Lose Donations to the 30% Trust Tax — and Most Can't Tell If They're Exposed Treasury's consultation closed on Friday. The harder question for NFP finance teams isn't what Treasury decides — it's whether you can even identify how much of your income already arrives through a discretionary trust. Submissions on Treasury's consultation paper for the 30 per cent minimum tax on discretionary trusts closed on Friday, 31 July. The measure was announced in the 12 May Federal Budget, and if legislated it takes effect from 1 July 2028 — with no grandfathering for existing structures. It is not law yet. That distinction matters, and I'll come back to it. The policy target is tax minimisation and income splitting by wealthy families and small businesses. The complication the charity sector spent July raising is that family ph...

2 August 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) Finance Reads of the Week: KPMG's Scandal Fallout Reaches 1,000 Jobs, the AML Deadline Most Firms Just Passed, and Who Climate Reporting Actually Catches Five operational and compliance reads for NFP, NDIS, childcare and SME finance teams — including one widely repeated claim about charities and climate reporting that doesn't survive a look at the legislation. Sunday's round-up is the compliance-and-operations digest: the deadlines, funding conditions and rule changes that don't make headlines outside the sector but change what your finance function has to do. This week's batch has a deadline that passed on Wednesday, a mandatory training obligation that started on Friday, and a reporting requirement a lot of NFP boards have been told applies to them when it very likely doesn't. 1. KPMG Australia weighs cutting up to 1,000 staff and dozens of partners as the audit ...

1 August 2026  •  By Timothy, CPA — Managing Director, Professional Financelink (PFL) AI News Wrap-Up: A Big Four Firm's AI-Written Research Falls Apart, Altman Talks About Slowing Down, and the ASX Puts AI in Its Draft Governance Code Six stories from the past week — three about what AI can now do, three about who is supposed to be watching it — plus what I'd actually take from each one. Every Saturday I pull together the AI stories that matter to a finance function rather than the ones that trend. This week split cleanly: three items about capability and price, three about accountability. The one I'd read first isn't a model release — it's a consulting firm's own research collapsing under a check that took an afternoon. 1. PwC published AI "thought leadership" riddled with fake footnotes — the third Big Four firm caught this year Researchers at GPTZero, with their findings verified by the Financial Times , identified four PwC Middle Eas...