Your Payroll Report Became A Live Audit. The People Missing From It Are The Risk.

Single touch payroll for an offshore team has a shorter answer than most founders expect. A non-resident who works outside Australia for a foreign employer is not in your STP report, because there is no Australian withholding to report on them. The ATO says the same of super: you do not pay it for "non-resident employees who work outside Australia".

So far, so comfortable.

What changed on 1 July is not the answer. It is who checks it, and how often. Outstaffer sells the structural version of that answer, an employer of record for the people who genuinely sit overseas, so treat that as a disclosure.

Payday Super made your payroll file the evidence

Since 1 July 2026, super must reach the fund within seven business days of payday, on a wider base the ATO calls qualifying earnings, still at 12 per cent. You no longer lodge a super guarantee statement. The ATO assesses the charge itself.

Deputy Commissioner Emma Rosenzweig said at the time: Payday Super "will provide the ATO with earlier visibility of under-payment or non-payment of super".

Visibility of what, though. Your payroll report, read against what the funds received, every cycle.

On 15 October the ATO published draft practice statement PS LA 2026/D4, covering Commissioner-initiated assessments under section 36 of the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act. Comments close on 13 November. It sits on the advice under development list, updated 16 October, beside four other unfinished pieces of super guidance.

Who belongs in single touch payroll, and who does not

Does an overseas team member appear in your report?

Only where Australian withholding attaches to what you pay them. Employ a Manila developer through a Philippine entity, resident there, working there, and there is nothing to report and no super to pay.

Send one of your Australian staff to work abroad and it inverts. The ATO guidance is blunt: "you must continue to pay super contributions for them in Australia". Same desk, different residency, opposite answer.

What about a contractor paid mainly for their labour?

That is the sentence that catches people. The ATO's position is that "independent contractors who are paid mainly for their labour are eligible for super guarantee", on the labour component of the invoice. Residency and where the work physically happens are still the two facts that settle a contractor invoice, not the wording on the agreement.

The arithmetic of being wrong about one person

Take a contractor invoicing $9,000 a month who should have been treated as an employee for super. Twelve per cent is $1,080 a month, $12,960 across a year. The penalty runs at 25 per cent of the unpaid charge, or 50 per cent where you were penalised inside the previous 24 months, so $3,240 or $6,480 on top, before the administrative uplift and the interest the ATO adds. That interest now compounds daily rather than running to a quarterly statement date.

Two concessions are real. The charge is tax deductible now, and the maximum penalty fell from 200 per cent to 50.

Neither fixes the timing, which is what hurts a 30-person business. The money leaves in one assessed lump, after the fact, while the payment side of the same deadline is still running monthly in another currency.

Most of these arrangements are fine, and that is not the point

A genuinely non-resident team, employed by a genuine foreign entity, doing work that physically happens there, was never an Australian super question. Enforcement has been slow because the ATO had to wait for an employer to volunteer that something was wrong.

That is the bit that moved. Not the test. The trigger.

Related reading

• Australia will not bill you for super on your Manila hire
• Your payroll tax bill does not move when the desk does

What to do before the next payroll run

List everyone you pay who never appears in your STP report, and write beside each their tax residency and where the work physically happens. If you cannot fill both columns from records rather than memory, that gap is the finding. Get advice on your own circumstances, because the answer turns on facts specific to each person.

If that list runs longer than you expected, sign up and hand the employment of your team overseas to somebody else. Or leave it, which is also a decision, just not a deliberate one.

Which column would you struggle to fill in?