Sally Hunter (Customer) asked a question.
STAMP DUTY NO LONGER CALCULATING PRIOR TO EXCHANGE
Leap made an unnecessary and unwanted change to the system in 2022. Leap now requires an exchange date to be inputted prior to stamp duty calculating. This is hugely impractical and has lead to lost time by leap users who now have to go to the Revenue NSW website to calculate a client's stamp duty liability. We are required to advise our client's of their stamp duty liability very early in the conveyancing process and certainly prior to exchange. Please revert to the old system and allow leap to calculate the stamp duty payable as soon as a purchase price is inputted into leap.
Hi Sally,
Thank you for your query. As you have identified, the calculation for the Stamp Duty does require an Exchange Date to be entered, but does not require that exchange date to have been passed to be used. If you do not yet know the Exchange Date for the property, you can enter the date you are calculating the stamp duty on, and then correct the Exchange Date once all of the particulars have been sorted out.
If you have any further difficulties with this, you can contact our HelpDesk at support@leap.com.au or via the LiveChat.
Kind Regards,
Simon
Simon
Thank you for your response. However, that approach is a risky one and one that a lot of leap users will not be on board with. If we put in an exchange date which is not the actual exchange date this is fraught with danger of forgetting to update that exchange date later. This can be detrimental to correct records being kept and we run the risk of incorrectly noting what is a very important date in a conveyancing transaction and for vendors and purchasers down the track if the property is dealt with again/tax liabilities assessed etc. I know a lot of leap users (in my firm and others) will not put in a dummy date to avoid this risk. Why can't the stamp duty calculation function not just revert to how it was prior to the update? Thanks.
Hi Sally,
Completely understand your concern here. I've spoken to our Content team, who have advised me that they are working on getting the Stamp Duty calculation back to how it was previously, whereby if no exchange date is entered it will take today's date as exchange date for purposes of calculation.
I unfortunately cannot give you a firm timeframe on this, as it is a complex piece of coding, and cannot just be put back to how it was previously due to using different technological solutions to reach the same outcome. Thanks for your patience whilst we work on this, and for raising this with us.
Kind Regards,
Simon