Five years on, super stapling a clunky SNAFU

Mike Taylor

Managing Editor/Publisher, Financial Newswire

6 March 2026

Nearly five years down the track, superannuation stapling remains clunky, at best, and an administrative work in progress, according to a report by the Senate Economics Legislation Committee.

Superannuation fund stapling introduced in late 2021 is meant to reduce the creation of duplicate accounts by having accounts follow employees from job to job, but evidence to the committee points to ongoing technical implementation issues on the part of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).

The committee was reviewing the Treasury Laws Amendment (Supporting Choice of Superannuation and Other Measures) Bill 2025 and a key area of agreement between both Government and Coalition Senators was that the stapling regime is struggling.

The committee’s majority report noted specifically notes the “concerns of submitters about current technical barriers to stapled fund retrieval and the associated risks of duplicate account creation”.

The dissenting report lodged by Coalition Senators was much more focused and critical about the problems with the stapling regime stating that evidence to the Committee noted that:

• The ATO system is unreliable. Stapled fund responses are not consistently returned to employers or onboarding software within the onboarding window;
• System readiness varies significantly across service providers; and
• Regulatory detail regarding sequencing and compliance remains unresolved.

“The Committee heard clear evidence that the current stapled fund API does not consistently return results within the onboarding window. MYOB noted that the service returns a result only around 60 per cent of the time,” the dissenting report said.

“SuperAPI similarly raised concerns that reliance on a single retrieval pathway increases the risk of duplicate account creation where retrieval fails. Employment Hero warned that, in practice, employees may be shown only the employer default fund where stapled retrieval is unsuccessful,” it said.

The dissenting report said that if stapled information is not returned in time, employers might default employees into a new fund thereby risking increasing, rather than reducing, account proliferation.

“Parliament should not legislate on the assumption that systems will operate flawlessly when stakeholders have identified clear operational constraints,” it said.

The majority report noted that “The committee was advised that the ATO stapled super fund API currently hinders wider adoption of super stapling API use by DSPs because it is not fit for purpose in high-volume digital onboarding”.

“Other submitters requested the ATO be provided with additional funding to improve and uplift their services for identifying stapled funds, as well as that there be further consultations between the ATO and DSPs to overcome challenges with implementation of the bill,” it said.