Welcome!
Hi There,
I hope you had a wonder Christmas and New Year!
Here we are, 2024. Where has time gone?!
I thought I would kick off the year with my first newsletter aimed to give you insightful and helpful information.
I'm sure that you, like me, have grand plans for this year! My plan is to build The Accounting Academy to be the number one accounting and tax school in Australia. A year might be a bit ambitious, but it's great to dream big!
I would love to hear about your plans!
Now, let's get into the nitty gritty.
The Tax Practitioners Board have been releasing a lot of updates around disqualified practitioners. I have included 2 releases below.
Tax Agent Disqualified
In the first link below, a practitioner was disqualified for, amongst other things, allowing an unregistered person to receive funds into their bank account. This goes against the supervision and control aspect of the Tax Agent Administration Act (TASA).
This includes any services that you provide that you are not currently licenced to do, for example, bookkeeping and payroll is generally includes giving advice on GST and PAYG Withholding, so falls under TASA. This means that if you are not a registered BAS Agent, you cannot offer bookkeeping or payroll services for a fee. They must all be invoiced under a registered agent.
As you will read in the next section, if you have been found to have contravened TASA, you could potentially miss out on receiving your own agent licence, so it is important that we adhere to the rules. It's not just a formality, but an essential to getting your own licence.
To ensure we are compliant with TASA, you need to ensure the following:
- Your client is aware that you are being supervised and they are aware of the identity of the person or entity you are being supervised by.
- All clients have a letter of engagement and it is signed by the client and the supervising tax agent.
- All monies are received into an account that is owned by the tax agent.
- All clients have the ID verified. This is as simple as viewing a photo ID in person or over a video call and confirming this has been done in Xero Practice Manager (XPM).
New Codes Added to TASA
The second article is a about the 2 new codes (Code item 15 & 16) has been added into TASA. The new codes stop a tax agent from working with anyone that has previously been disqualified.
Reasons for disqualification include:
- Having been found in contravention of TASA
- Undischarged bankrupt
- Convicted of a serious tax offence
- Penalised for implementing or promoting a tax exploitation scheme.
- Registration being denied or terminated
There is a lot to unpack here, but I am here to help you!
We will be implementing a few things over the coming months to help ensure we stay compliant, and to help make life easier.
- Online courses
- Document management system
- Updates to XPM and Xero Workpapers
- Regular newsletters and updates
If there is anything you would like to see, or if you have any feedback on this newsletter, let me know.
Have a great week!
Cheers,
Daniel
