Bookkeepers: professional indemnity requirements in New South Wales

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 bookkeeper licence in Australia — bookkeeping itself is unregulated. What IS regulated is the work: a person providing a BAS service for a fee or other reward must be registered as a BAS 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 the limit figure on a certificate means
• Cover for the principal for your work
• When a certificate falls short of the contract

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

• Tax Practitioners Board — Tax Practitioners Board — professional indemnity insurance