The bar keeps rising while the hours don't. A look at how leading Australian practices are closing the gap — and lodging without the stress.
Every tax season, the standard a registered agent is held to creeps a little higher — while the hours in the day stay exactly the same. "Reasonable care" isn't a new obligation, but the volume of legislation, guidance and cross-checks folded into it has grown to a point most firms quietly struggle to meet on every single return.
Each year brings new determinations, revised guidance and fresh matching data on the ATO's side. Keeping current isn't optional — it's the baseline expectation. But staying across all of it, and applying it perfectly to every entity in a group, is a genuinely hard ask for a stretched team.
Australia is short more than 10,000 accountants, and the ones you have are already at capacity. When the reviewer and the preparer are the same person — as they are in most firms — the "second set of eyes" is really just the same tired set, later in the day.
That's exactly the kind of fatigue error a tireless second pass is built to catch: not the exotic technical calls, but the routine label, the mismatched pre-fill, the code that reads wrong to the ATO's engine.
The firms handling this best aren't working longer hours — they've added a consistent review step before lodgement that never gets skipped, never gets tired, and documents what it checked. It turns "reasonable care" from a nightly worry into a repeatable process.
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Two decades reviewing returns across every entity type — and a computer-science background that turned into Tony.Online, the tireless second review he always wished he had.
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