Your profession, plainly · ACCOUNTING
You keep businesses honest with numbers. Since the first of July twenty twenty-six, some of the services accountants provide — setting up companies and trusts, moving client money in deals — are designated services under Australia's anti-money-laundering law. The key word is some. Here is where the line actually falls.
Since 1 July 2026
First, the frame. You are not regulated for who you are — you are regulated for one or two specific services the Act lists by name. Provide one, and you are what the law calls a reporting entity: enrolled with AUSTRAC, running a small program, checking who you deal with. Not a suspect. A gatekeeper.
assisting a person to plan or execute, or otherwise acting on behalf of a person in, the creation or restructuring of: (a) a body corporate (other than a corporation under the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act 2006); or (b) a legal arrangement; in the course of carrying on a business
The everyday gate
Day to day, the visible change is small. Before you provide that designated service, you confirm who your customer is — a couple of extra minutes for the honest ones, which is nearly everyone. The same gate for every customer. Routine, universal, nothing personal.
The program behind it
Behind the counter sits a small program: a risk assessment in your own words, policies your senior people adopt, one named compliance officer, and staff who have been trained. And the Act itself right-sizes it — your steps need only be appropriate to the nature, size and complexity of your business. Small firm, simpler program. Never nothing, but never a bank's program either.
The two triggers
Day to day, two triggers matter. A client arrangement that makes no commercial sense and makes you genuinely uneasy starts a report clock. And cash at or over ten thousand dollars has its own routine report. Both are walked through, step by step, in this channel's main series.
The line: services, not your title
And the line matters. The duty follows the service, not the letters after your name. Preparing a tax return or keeping the books, by itself, is not on the list. Standing up a company for a client, restructuring a trust, holding client money in a transaction — that is. Map your service list against the table once, carefully, and you know exactly where you stand.
Write it down
And the habit that holds it all together: write things down when they happen. The check you ran, the question you asked, the call you made. Records keep for seven years — and the record of an honest process is the best protection your business can own.