ATO Advises – Fuel Tax Credits For Heavy Vehicles
To assist your members to determine their fuel tax credit entitlement for fuel used in heavy vehicles, we have released the following guidance documents:
- Practical compliance guideline PCG 2016/11 (replaces PSLA 2013/4 (GA)). This is a guide to methods your members can use to apportion fuel used in heavy vehicles to power auxiliary equipment, such as the bin lifting of a rubbish collection truck. There are percentages they can apply so they won’t need to do complex calculations and sample testing.
- A new fuel tax determination (FTD 2016/1), which explains that the fuel tax credit rate is reduced by the road user charge for fuel used in a heavy vehicle for:
- idling on a public road;
- powering the air conditioning unit of the vehicle’s main cabin when travelling on a public road.
Public roads
We have clarified the explanation of a ‘public road’ in fuel tax ruling FTR 2008/1.
A public road is a road available for use by members of the public.
So, for toll roads, bus lanes and busways use the ‘heavy vehicle for travelling on public roads‘ rate for fuel used in heavy vehicles travelling on these roads.
Your members can continue to use the ‘all other business uses’ rate for fuel used for travelling on forestry, mining access and agricultural property roads as these are examples of roads that are not classified as ‘public’.
What we ask you to do
We encourage you to inform your members of these updates.
If your members have not used the correct rate when calculating their fuel tax credit, they need to amend their BAS.
We will be discussing these changes further at next week’s Fuel Schemes Stakeholder Group meeting on 14 September.
We are in the process of updating our Heavy vehicles web page to reflect these changes. The new information will be available within the next few days.
Don’t forget to remind your members to use our fuel tax credit calculator or see the fuel tax credit rates on our website.