Tax and Financial Crime Investigations: What Accountants and Advisers Should Do Before Speaking to Investigators

If you are an accountant, bookkeeper, conveyancer, financial adviser, you may have had a version of this thought recently: a client asked you to do something, you did it, and afterwards you wondered how it would look if someone else read the file.

That situation is more common than most professionals realise, and having it does not mean anything has gone wrong.

From 1 July 2026, a large number of Australian practices that have never been supervised by a financial regulator became reporting entities under anti-money laundering legislation. These are civil obligations administered by AUSTRAC, and their application does not imply any wrongdoing. What has shifted alongside these obligations—and what forms the focus of this article—is the heightened scrutiny now directed toward the role of advisers in financial crime, and how professionals should navigate this environment when enquiries turn in their direction.

The first part of this article sets out who the new laws capture and why it matters. The second part deals with the question most professionals in this position are actually asking: what should I do if I think I am being investigated?

The new AML/CTF landscape in brief

Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws now apply to designated services commonly provided by legal professionals, accountants, conveyancers, real estate professionals, and dealers in precious metals, stones and products. That list is AUSTRAC’s own, and it is worth reading closely, because secondary reporting sometimes adds categories that are not in it.

Crucially, reporting entity status under AUSTRAC guidelines depends on the specific designated services a practice provides rather than its professional job titles. Consequently, two accountants operating within the same practice may have entirely different compliance obligations based on the precise nature of the services they deliver to clients.

The designated services set out in table 6 of subsection 6(5B) of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 cover conduct such as assisting in transactions to buy, sell or transfer real estate or companies, receiving or managing a person’s money or property as part of a transaction, arranging for someone to act as a director, secretary or trustee, and providing a registered office address. AUSTRAC draws the boundary around conduct that directly advances one of those outcomes. Merely influencing how a client proceeds, or giving general advice, is not enough.

 

Why regulators are now looking at advisers

The Serious Financial Crime Taskforce is ATO-led and was established on 1 July 2015. It brings together the AFP, ASIC, AUSTRAC, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Border Force, Home Affairs, Services Australia, the Attorney-General’s Department and the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. It is worth pausing on that last one. The CDPP does not conduct audits. Its role is prosecution.

The ATO lists “the misuse of professional services” as a category of serious financial crime in its own right, alongside tax evasion, money laundering and phoenix activity, and describes professional enablers as people who “use their skills to steal information, set up dodgy companies, hide money and rip people off.” That is the regulator’s language, and it describes a small group of deliberate participants, not the professions as a whole. In July 2023 the Government committed $223.8 million over four years to extend the Taskforce to 30 June 2027.

So the picture is not simply that a new compliance obligation was brought into practice on 1 July. It is that a large new population of professionals came under supervision at the same time as the agencies enforcing financial crime said, in writing, that professional facilitators are a focus. That is the environment in which the rest of this article applies.

Where the line sits between advising and being party to an offence

There is a question most professionals have never had to answer.

A client uses your advice to break the law. Does that make you part of it?

In most situations, most of the time, it does not. Giving advice that someone later misuses is not a crime, and Australian criminal law does not punish professionals for being deceived by a client who lied to them. What it applies to is participation. Under the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), a person who aids, abets, counsels or procures an offence can be found guilty of that offence as though they had committed it themselves.

Two things bear on which side of the line conduct falls.

What you knew. The prosecution has to prove a state of mind rather than just an act. It is not enough that your work turned out to have a role in someone else’s offence. Knowledge can be established by inference from the surrounding facts. Courts have long treated deliberately avoiding an obvious question as capable of amounting to knowledge. Not having asked is a more difficult position than many people expect it to be.

What you did. Simply explaining how a legal structure works is providing advice. In contrast, creating or implementing that structure while knowing it will be used for an unlawful purpose crosses the line into active participation.

Other charges approach the same conduct, including dealing with proceeds of crime, obtaining a financial advantage by deception, general dishonesty offences against the Commonwealth, and the new AML/CTF offences themselves.

In the matters Slades & Parsons acts in, two advisers can do very similar work and find themselves in quite different positions. What separates them is often not the work at all, but what the provided information indicates about what each adviser understood at the time. That is a question of evidence rather than character, and it is one our team can help answer.

How an investigation usually begins

Most professionals have dealt with a regulator before, whether that is an ATO audit, an ASIC query or a professional body review. Those experiences teach a particular set of instincts: be helpful, be open, produce the documents, explain the reasoning, get it resolved.

Those instincts are right for an audit.

They can cause difficulty once conduct is capable of being charged, because the two processes look similar from the outside but have distinct differences in reality. An audit is concerned with liability, and cooperation genuinely helps. A criminal investigation is concerned with proof, and the material provided forms part of it.

In our experience the transition is rarely announced. There is no moment at which someone says the nature of the process has changed. A professional is asked for more documents, then for a conversation, then to attend an interview, and by that point a lot of documentation has already been provided. The signs that a process has moved beyond an audit include the involvement of agencies other than the one that initiated it, questions directed at state of mind rather than at the figures, and requests for records of what a client said rather than what was done.

None of that is a reason to treat every regulator contact as an emergency. It is a reason to find out early which kind of process it is.

What to do if you think you are being investigated

This is the question the professionals who come to Slades & Parsons are usually asking by the time they make the call. In most cases it is not too late, but the period before a first response is almost always the most useful one.

Work out which process you are in

A notice compelling production of documents and an invitation to a voluntary interview are very different things. They carry different obligations and different risks. It is not always apparent from the correspondence, and it is a question we can usually answer quickly. Slades & Parsons regularly reviews these notices for professionals who are not yet sure whether they need representation, and in many cases the answer is that the process is routine.

Get advice before responding

These processes generally allow time to obtain advice before a response is given. Once an account has been provided it forms part of the material in the matter, and it is not something that can be revisited later. Being cooperative and being represented are different things, and doing the first well does not achieve the second outcome.

A number of the professionals who come to us have already given a full account before anyone raised the question of their own position. A professional who answers every question fully, explains frankly and volunteers information freely has behaved exactly as their training taught them, and may at the same time have provided material a prosecution would later rely on. That is an uncomfortable thing to discover after the fact, and it is usually an avoidable situation.

Leave the file exactly as it stands

Records are sometimes tidied, annotated or reconstructed after contact has been made, ordinarily by people acting out of anxiety. It causes real difficulty, because it can turn a defensible position into a separate allegation.

Conversely, the existing file is often the strongest evidence available. File notes, engagement letters, contemporaneous emails and records of what a client said at the time go directly to what an adviser understood when they acted. More often than not, those records help the professional’s case. 

Understand the limits of privilege

Legal professional privilege does not automatically cover everything in an accountant’s or adviser’s file, and what it protects is often narrower than people expect. Establishing what is and is not privileged is one of the first things Slades & Parsons works through with professionals in this position, because it affects what can be compelled and what cannot.

Understand what seeking advice means

Seeking advice early is not an admission that something is wrong. It is how a professional assesses the situation, and what a particular notice or request actually obliges them to do, before they respond to it. For most professionals it is also the first conversation in their working life where the question is not “how do I fix this?” but “what am I exposed to?”

Those are different questions, and they call for different advice.

If a matter goes further

A regulator taking an interest in a professional’s work does not mean a charge will follow, and for many professionals it does not.

Where a matter escalates, the range of dispositions available to a court is not widely known. Because these are Commonwealth offences, sentencing is governed by the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) rather than Victorian sentencing legislation, which affects the orders a court can make. What a court arrives at in any particular case changes depending on the nature of the conduct, the person’s history, what has happened since, and how the matter is prepared and presented. No two matters are the same, and nobody is in a position to predict a result at the outset. 

Slades & Parsons have defended clients in complex Commonwealth prosecutions for over 35 years, and these questions: what happened, what it means, and what can be done about it — are the ones our team works with every day.

Talk to Slades & Parsons

Our team is recognised by the Law Institute of Victoria as Accredited Specialists in criminal law, and we act for individuals, company officers and businesses in matters investigated by the ATO, ASIC, AUSTRAC and the AFP.

We understand what is at stake when the person under investigation is a professional. It is rarely only the charge. It is the practice, the registration, the referral relationships and a reputation built over a working lifetime. We also know that most people in this position have never needed a criminal lawyer before, and are not sure whether they need one now.

If you have been contacted by a regulator about a client’s conduct, received a notice, or have reason to think your work has come to an agency’s attention, we would be glad to talk it through with you before you respond. Call (03) 9602 3000 for a confidential discussion, or contact us here. There is no cost to finding out where you stand.