Clearly, the formation of a clearing house will take months if not years, which is why some are thinking about reforms which may be easier to implement. The banking system should be brought more into play, in the view of Rice Warner director, Michael Rice. He believes the payment of straightforward SG contributions are little different to the payment of wages through the standardised system of BSB numbers. “People ought to know their superannuation details like they know about their tax file number and bank account details,” Rice believes.

When joining a new employer, Rice sees no reason why a worker could not fill out encoded details of their existing super fund on their employer declaration form. “There would be a handful of codes needed for fund administrators to be able to process the information sent to them by the bank – for instance is the contribution concessionally taxed, is it a spouse account, is it SG or salary-sacrificed?” Every fund and every member would have a unique number as part of the coding. Some forms would still be left blank and people would still have multiple accounts – just as the occasional employer who still pays cash wages in the post-GST era might send a contributions cheque – but Rice thinks integration into the banking system would use existing infrastructure – to reduce much of the extra cost generated by choice-of-fund.

Rice admits a hurdle to such reform would be the need for a lengthening of the standardised fields used in the banking system, but says the ATO could bring its authority to bear. “Remember the superannuation guarantee is a Tax Act,” he says. Even if the banking system does not become the conduit for contributions, Frank Gullone says at least that “mechanisms should be put in place to allow members to access base details regarding their supperanuation account (and any First Home Saver Account) via the automatic teller machine network and online facilities…this approach may reduce the number of general enquiries being made to call centres by members.”

InvestmentLink’s Peter Philip says the banking system alone cannot handle all the extra data and complexity involved with superannuation compared with wages. In any case, last month’s Budget made the clearing house a reality. Shaping that reality is likely to be fiercely contested in coming months, despite the collective gains to be made among all the major stakeholders. Will the Government allow ownership of the clearing house by a single provider, or support a consortium structure such as that called for by Citistreet?