Insurables — Australian business risk, sourced and dated

Accountants: professional indemnity requirements in New South Wales

Cover for legal liability arising from professional advice or services, written on a claims-made basis.

Data as at

Verified for New South Wales

  • Licence liability condition: Yes, where registration applies. Both tax agents and BAS agents must maintain professional indemnity insurance meeting Tax Practitioners Board requirements throughout registration. Failure to do so is a breach of the Code of Professional Conduct and can result in registration being terminated — the sanction is loss of the right to practise, not a fine. NSW · effective 2010-03-01 Tax Practitioners Board · 2026-08-24
  • Licence evidence required: Notification to the Board within 14 days of receiving registration confirmation, and maintenance of cover for the whole registration period thereafter. It is a notify-and-maintain obligation rather than a document filed once. NSW · effective 2010-03-01 Tax Practitioners Board · 2026-08-24
  • Licensing body: There is NO general accountant licence in Australia — accounting itself is an unregulated occupation, and membership of CPA Australia, CA ANZ or the IPA is voluntary professional membership, not a licence. What IS regulated is the work: providing tax agent services for a fee requires registration as a tax agent with the Tax Practitioners Board, under federal law. So the honest answer to "am I licensed?" depends entirely on what services are being sold, not on the job title. NSW · effective 2010-03-01 Tax Practitioners Board · 2026-08-24

What contracts commonly ask for

Principals and head contractors set their own insurance requirements, and those are frequently higher than a licence condition. The requirement that binds is the higher of the two, and both have to be read from the actual document.

What this cover costs

This site publishes no cost benchmark for this cover. A benchmark needs a real sample of documents, and none is published until the sample is large enough to compute a median honestly. A benchmark from a handful of policies is a guess with a decimal point.

Sources