Accounting for Salary Sacrificed Components of Wage and Salary Income

Abstract

Reflecting concerns about the inadequacies of existing measures of wage and salary income that ignored non-cash benefits, in 2006 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) announced changes to its measures of employee remuneration. These changes meant salary sacrificed amounts were now treated as equivalent to wages and salaries in cash, and non-cash benefits were now treated as wages and salaries in kind. The new approach is argued by the ABS to create greater consistency with established international conventions (in particular, the guidelines produced at the 17th International Conference of Labour Statisticians in 2003), and also addresses the trend growth in the proportion of wage and salary income received as salary sacrificed income or other non-cash benefits (ABS, 2006).