From 1 July 2025, new professionals standards and requirements come into effect under the Tax Agent Services Act (TASA).

The purpose of the changes to try and promote greater clarity and consistency in the tax profession as well as encourage accountability and transparency.

While we already hold ourselves to a high standard, we will now need to formalise many of our existing practices and you may notice some small changes in how we work with our clients.

These changes include how and when we issue engagement letters, how we communicate with clients, documentation we require, and how we provide advice.

 

Engagement Letters

The new TASA standards add more requirements in relation to issuing you with engagement letters. This will mean we may need to update our engagement agreements more often.

If anything arises during our work that may significantly affect the scope of the services were providing to you, we’re now required for formally notify you. This may mean we need to issue an updated engagement letter in some instances.

 

Notification Requirement

Under the new standards, we need to let you know that you have the right to raise a concern or make a complaint about our services. We will now outline this process and how to lodge a complaint in our engagement letter and you can find further information on our website.

We are now also required to disclose any matters to you that might influence your decision to work with us. This would include any past disciplinary action or registration restrictions in the last 5 years and how search for details about us on the Tax Practitioner Board website. While there are no matters to report at this stage we will include this information in our engagement letters and it will also be reported on our website.

The Tax Practitioner’s Board maintains a register of Tax Agents and BAS Agents. You can access and search this register to find more information about us here: https://www.tpb.gov.au/public-register

 

Stronger documentation:

As part of these updated requirements, we may also need to make more formal or specific requests to you to provide supporting documentation for certain claims, deductions, or transactions. While we’ve always taken care to ensure we have understood and substantiated your deductions and your position is accurate, we are now expected to retain more of this evidence on file, not just sight it or confirm it has been checked.

This means we may ask you to upload, email, or sign off on certain supporting materials, even where that hasn’t been requested previously. This doesn’t mean we no longer have the same confidence in what you have told us, it just means we are ensuring we meet our requirements with the current standards. We appreciate your patience and cooperation and will try and make these extra requests as painless as possible.

These extra steps allow us to meet the strengthened compliance requirements but also allow us to ensure that you are well protected in the event of an ATO review.

 

Providing Advice

Any advice we advise in relation to your tax situation will now need to be documented in writing. This means we cant just answer your questions in a quick call or casual conversation, we now need to document this in an email or provide you with written advice.

Depending on the complexity we may charge a fee for this advice, separately from your annual tax return preparation fee.

 

New Rules Around Client Conduct

Where we become aware of false or incorrect information or where mistakes of been made, we will be required to take reasonable steps to correct them and under certain circumstances notify the ATO of any errors or omissions that have been made.

Another key change is that we now have a formal obligation to disengage from clients who are not doing the right thing or acting dishonestly.  If we are aware that a client is knowingly providing false or misleading information, or refusing to comply with tax laws, we are required to cease acting for them. While we have always chosen to work with clients that share our own high ethical standards, this is now an explicit requirement under the updated Code of Professional Conduct.

 

Other Changes

As well as the above we have made other changes behind the scenes to update our systems and processes as well as enhance our team training and supervision to ensure we continue to comply with the new TPB requirements and provide the best possible service to our clients.

For more information see information for clients from the Tax Practicioner’s Board site Information for clients – Taxpayers

 

Author: Donna Bruce