Standard Choice Form NAT 13080: Eligibility, Deadlines, Penalties

If you employ someone in Australia who is eligible to pick their own super fund, you have to give them a way to nominate one, and the Standard Choice Form NAT 13080 is the ATO’s default tool for the job. You complete the employer section, hand it over, wait for the employee to return it, and then act on their choice within two months. Miss any part of that sequence and the cost climbs quickly, sometimes reaching directors personally.

When You Have to Give an Employee the Form

The ATO sets out four situations that trigger the obligation:

You take on a new employee who is eligible to choose a super fund.
An existing employee asks for a form because they want to redirect future contributions.
You can no longer contribute to an employee’s nominated fund, or that fund stops being a complying fund.
You change your business’s default fund and need to notify affected employees.

These apply whether the worker is full-time, part-time, or casual. You are not locked into the NAT 13080 PDF itself. Any document is acceptable as long as it covers the same mandatory fields, and employees can also generate a pre-filled version through their myGov-linked ATO online services and hand you the printed summary.¹²

Who Actually Gets to Choose

Not every worker is eligible, and offering a form to someone who cannot use it wastes time. Missing someone who can is worse.

Enterprise Agreements

Employees covered by an enterprise agreement or workplace determination made on or after 1 January 2021 are eligible to choose. Those covered by an agreement made before that date are not. Even so, if a pre-2021 employee does not make a choice, you still have to request their stapled super fund details from the ATO rather than routing contributions straight to your default fund.²

Workers Under 18

You only owe super for an employee under 18 if they work more than 30 hours in a given week. The 30 hours is measured week by week, not averaged across a fortnight or a month.³

Contractors Paid Mainly for Their Labour

A contractor paid mainly for their personal labour counts as an employee for super guarantee purposes, whether or not they hold an ABN. “Mainly for labour” means more than half the contract’s dollar value goes to the person’s own work, the payment is not tied to achieving a specific result, and the work cannot be delegated. A contract with a company, trust, or partnership does not trigger the obligation.⁴

Filling In the Employer Section

Before you hand the form over, complete Section C. That is the employer section covering your default super fund details. Section B is for the employee’s own fund information. Mixing these up is one of the most common mistakes on this form.

Section C asks for:

Your business name and ABN.
The name and ABN of your default super fund.
The Unique Superannuation Identifier (USI), which identifies the specific fund product and is different from a member account number.

You can pull these details from the fund’s product disclosure statement or ask the fund directly.⁵ Your default fund must be an APRA-registered fund offering a MySuper product. If it isn’t, you face additional penalties on top of the standard super guarantee charge.⁶

What to Do Once the Form Comes Back

You have two months from receiving a completed form to start paying contributions into the employee’s nominated fund.² That window often overlaps a quarterly super deadline, and those deadlines don’t move for payroll problems or software migrations:

Quarter 1 (Jul–Sep): 28 October
Quarter 2 (Oct–Dec): 28 January
Quarter 3 (Jan–Mar): 28 April
Quarter 4 (Apr–Jun): 28 July

Contributions have to be paid by these dates each year.⁷ All payments must go through SuperStream, the mandatory electronic standard that links the money and the data using a unique payment reference number. It applies to every employer regardless of size.⁸ Practically, that means loading the employee’s fund details (including their member account number and the fund’s electronic service address) into your payroll system.

What to Do If the Form Comes Back Empty

If a new employee doesn’t return a completed form, your next step is not to default them into your own fund. You have to check whether they already have a stapled super fund, an existing account that follows a person from job to job so they don’t collect duplicates each time they change employers.⁹

You or an authorised representative can request stapled fund details through ATO online services using the employee’s tax file number. The response comes back in real time. Only if the ATO confirms there is no stapled fund can you default the employee into your MySuper fund. The search has to happen before the first contribution is due.⁹

Businesses onboarding more than 100 new employees at once can use a bulk request instead. Download the ATO’s stapled super fund bulk request template, complete it, and submit through the secure mail function in ATO online services. The service standard is up to 14 business days, so build in lead time near quarterly due dates. Each entity in a consolidated group has to submit its own form. The bulk process is currently an interim service and may be retired later.⁹

What Non-Compliance Costs

Missing super obligations produces a layered set of costs, and the layers combine.

The Superannuation Guarantee Charge

If you don’t pay the correct super amount by the quarterly deadline, you become liable for the superannuation guarantee charge (SGC). It is always more expensive than paying on time because it comprises:

The SG shortfall, calculated on total salary and wages including overtime rather than just ordinary time earnings.
Nominal interest of 10% per annum, accruing from the first day of the relevant quarter.
An administration fee of $20 per employee per quarter.

You cannot claim a tax deduction for the SGC, whereas on-time contributions are deductible. That gap makes late payment materially worse than the arithmetic alone suggests.¹⁰

Choice Liability

Separately from the SGC, a choice liability penalty applies if you fail to honour an employee’s fund selection. It is triggered if you did not provide the choice form within the required timeframe, paid super to the wrong fund, failed to request a stapled fund for someone who started on or after 1 November 2021, or charged the employee a fee for implementing their choice. The choice liability equals 25% of the contributions that went to the wrong place, capped at $500 per employee per notice period.

Director Personal Liability

Company directors are personally exposed to unpaid SGC through the director penalty regime. The liability mirrors the company’s debt, and the ATO can issue a Director Penalty Notice (DPN) to recover it from you as an individual.

If the company reported its SGC by the due date, you have 21 days from the notice to resolve the penalty. Options are paying the debt in full, appointing an administrator, engaging a small business restructuring practitioner, or starting to wind up the company. If the SGC was reported late or never reported, those alternatives fall away and full payment becomes the only route.¹¹

New directors inheriting a company with existing SGC debts have 30 days from their appointment to ensure the company pays the outstanding amount or takes one of the other corrective actions. Defences exist if you were unable to participate in management due to illness, or if you took all reasonable steps to ensure compliance.¹¹

Keeping the Records and Protecting Tax File Numbers

Every completed choice form, stapled fund request, and contribution record has to be kept for five years. For super fund choice records, the five-year clock starts from the date the employee was engaged, or the date they were offered, chose, or changed their fund.¹² Records can be paper or electronic, as long as they remain accessible for audit. The maximum fine for a record-keeping conviction is 30 penalty units, with an additional administrative penalty of up to 20 penalty units.¹³

Choice forms contain employee tax file numbers, which pulls in the Privacy (Tax File Number) Rule 2015. You have to take reasonable steps to protect TFN information from misuse, loss, and unauthorised access. Access to records containing TFNs should be restricted to staff who genuinely need it for tax or super purposes. When the information is no longer required by law or necessary for super administration, you have to securely destroy or permanently de-identify it.¹⁴

Staff handling these forms need to understand the privacy rules and the penalties for mishandling TFN data. A breach of the TFN Rule counts as an interference with privacy under the Privacy Act 1988, and unauthorised disclosure of TFNs can result in criminal penalties under the Taxation Administration Act 1953.¹⁴

1
Australian Taxation Office. Superannuation Standard Choice Form
2
Australian Taxation Office. Offer Employees a Choice of Super Fund
3
Australian Taxation Office. Work Out if You Have to Pay Super
4
Australian Taxation Office. Super for Independent Contractors
5
Australian Taxation Office. ATO Superannuation Standard Choice Form
6
Australian Taxation Office. Module 3 – Setting Up Quarterly Super for Your Employees
7
Australian Taxation Office. Super Payment Due Dates
8
Australian Taxation Office. Paying Electronically Through SuperStream
9
Australian Taxation Office. Stapled Super Funds for Employers
10
Australian Taxation Office. The Super Guarantee Charge
11
Australian Taxation Office. Director Penalty Regime
12
Australian Taxation Office. 5 Rules for Record Keeping
13
Australian Taxation Office. Super Guarantee Penalties
14
Australian Taxation Office. Privacy (Tax File Number) Rule 2015