Accountants: directory of firms

The Tax Practitioners Board keeps a public register of tax agents and BAS agents. You can search it before you hand over a single document. It shows whether a registration is current, what type it is, and any conditions the Board has imposed, and it also carries details of some practitioners whose registration was terminated, with the reason. That search is the single most useful check an Australian can make on an accountant, and it takes under a minute.

Professional bodies add a second layer. CPA Australia requires any member providing public accounting services in or into Australia to hold a public practice certificate under its by-laws, along with professional indemnity insurance. Members in public practice also carry continuing professional development obligations and work under the profession's ethical code. The line about liability being limited by a scheme approved under professional standards legislation, which appears on many letterheads, is a professional standards scheme at work rather than marketing.

A normal engagement starts with a conversation about scope and fees, then a letter of engagement setting out what each side will do. The TPB suggests settling the details of the work, its timing, the fee structure and where any refund will be paid before anything begins.

Businesses then complete the ATO's agent nomination step. Under client-to-agent linking, the business logs in to Online services for business and nominates the agent before the agent can be added to its account. It is a fraud control, it sits with you rather than with the accountant, and the nomination lapses if it is not used, so it is worth doing promptly once you have chosen someone.

From 1 July 2026 accountants are among the professions brought inside Australia's anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regime. The obligations attach to particular designated services rather than to accounting in general: helping plan or carry out a sale or transfer of real estate or of a company, receiving or controlling client property as part of a transaction, arranging equity or debt financing, selling a shelf company, creating or restructuring a company or trust, acting as or arranging a director or trustee, and supplying a registered office address.

Where your accountant does that work, AUSTRAC expects them to know who the client is before the service starts. That is why identity documents and questions about who ultimately owns an entity now appear at the beginning of engagements that used to open with a handshake.

The ATO requires business records to explain the transactions behind your tax and super position, to be in English or easily convertible to English, and to be kept for five years in most cases. The clock generally runs from when the record was made or the transaction completed, whichever is later, and some records, such as those for assets you still hold, have to be kept longer.

An accountant charges for the time spent working out what a receipt was for. Bank feeds coded as you go, invoices stored where they can be found, and a short note against anything unusual will take more off a fee than shopping around will.