The Tax Agent Services (Code of Professional Conduct) Determination 2024 introduced eight additional obligations for every registered tax agent and BAS agent under the TASA. It was registered in July 2024, and after the government deferred the original start date, the obligations commenced on 1 January 2025 for larger firms and on 1 July 2025 for firms with 100 or fewer employees as at 31 July 2024. That means they now apply universally. Most of what the Determination requires is not new in principle, because it builds on Code obligations and professional standards firms were already working to, but it is considerably more specific, and that specificity is where the practical work sits. The obligations generating the most real questions are the ones on record-keeping, false or misleading statements, and keeping clients informed.
What the eight obligations cover
The eight obligations span: upholding and promoting the ethical standards of the profession, not making false or misleading statements to the TPB or government, managing conflicts of interest in activities undertaken for government, maintaining confidentiality in dealings with government, keeping proper client records, ensuring tax agent services provided on the firm's behalf are provided competently, establishing and maintaining a quality management system, and keeping current and prospective clients informed of relevant matters. Several of these overlap heavily with what the existing Code and the APESB ethical standards already demanded, which is why the professional bodies have noted that most practitioners will find they are already largely compliant. The point of reviewing them is not to rebuild a practice from scratch, it is to find the specific gaps where the firm's current habits fall short of the new, more prescriptive wording, and those gaps cluster in three places: section 30 on records, section 15 on false or misleading statements, and section 45 on keeping clients informed.
The record-keeping obligation and the five-year rule
Section 30 requires practitioners to keep records that correctly record every tax agent service provided to each client, including former clients. The records must be in English or readily convertible to English, retained for at least five years from the date the service is complete, and must show the nature, scope and outcome of the service, referencing the information reasonably considered and documenting the assumptions and reasoning behind any advice, including the basis of any calculations. The consequence that catches firms out is that this is not only about retaining documents that already exist, it is about creating records where none currently do. A phone call in which advice is given is a tax agent service, and if nothing is written down about what was discussed, what position was taken, and what the client was told, the service has not been properly recorded. The TPB is clear that the obligation extends to making records, not merely filing them. For a firm that runs on phone and email and has no consistent habit of documenting those conversations, section 30 is a genuine structural change to how advice is captured and stored, not a paperwork tidy-up.
The client-advice trap most firms are missing
The most discussed practical problem is where section 15 meets the everyday reality of informal advice. The scenario is familiar in every firm: a client calls mid-task and asks whether they should put a new vehicle in the family trust, the accountant gives a view based on what they know, and the client acts on it before anything is confirmed in writing. If that advice relates to a tax liability or entitlement the client is reasonably expected to rely on, it is a tax agent service, the section 30 record-keeping obligation attaches to it, and if a material error later emerges and is not corrected within a reasonable time, section 15 obligations can come into play. It is worth noting that section 15 was amended in late 2024 after strong pushback from the professional bodies, which softened the most contentious "report your client" elements, so the obligation is narrower than the original version that alarmed the profession. But the underlying exposure around undocumented, relied-upon advice remains, and the protection is straightforward and the same one that solves most of these problems: an engagement letter that sets the scope of services before advice is given, plus a short written follow-up after any significant call where a position was communicated. Not a formal letter for every question, but a brief email summarising the advice and any caveats. That single habit creates the record section 30 requires and materially reduces the exposure section 15 creates.
The takeaway
The Determination is now in full effect for every Australian accounting firm, and most of what it demands is not new in substance, only in specificity. The five-year record-keeping rule requires firms to create records of advice, not just file documents that already exist. The keeping-clients-informed obligation under section 45 means engagement letters and client communications need to address the TPB register, the complaints process, and relevant practitioner information. And the false-or-misleading-statements obligation under section 15 means informal advice a client acts on carries real documentation weight. Firms that update their engagement letters, build a call-documentation habit, and stand up a quality management system covering these areas are compliant, and mostly already were. Firms that leave it for later are carrying an exposure that quietly compounds with every undocumented client conversation, which is exactly the kind of risk that is cheap to close now and expensive to explain later.
