It's been close to a year since the new Code obligations under the Tax Agent Services (Code of Professional Conduct) Determination 2024 became binding for most practitioners. The headline obligation - and the one that's caused the most quiet panic in smaller practices - is the requirement to establish and maintain a documented quality management system.
In short, every company, partnership or trust providing tax agent or BAS services must now have a QMS in place that's tailored to the size and complexity of the practice. Sole practitioners aren't off the hook either - they still have the underlying competence obligation, just without the structural QMS requirement on top.
What TPB(I) 48/2024 actually expects
The TPB's guidance on this is reasonably detailed, but it boils down to seven elements your system needs to address:
- Risk identification and assessment - what could go wrong in your practice, and how likely is it
- Resource management - do you have the people, tech and processes for the services you offer
- Engagement and acceptance - how you decide which clients to take on and on what terms
- Performance of services - the actual work, including supervision and review checkpoints
- Monitoring - how you keep an eye on the system working as intended
- Documentation - the policies, procedures and records that prove the above
- Review - periodic review of the system itself
A few of these are familiar territory if you've been operating to ISO 9001 or any practice quality standard before. Most BAS practices haven't been, and that's where the work is.
"Documented" is the bit people underestimate
This is the part I find most practitioners haven't quite landed on yet. "Documented" doesn't mean a 30-page Word file titled "Quality Management System" that sits in a SharePoint folder nobody opens. The TPB's expectation - and what they'll actually ask for in a compliance audit - is evidence that the system is operating. That's a different thing.
Concretely, evidence looks like:
- Engagement letters with the right scope, signed and version-controlled
- A risk register that's been updated within the last year (not three years ago)
- Training records showing each staff member has completed CPE relevant to the work they're doing
- Document review trails - who reviewed what, when, what they changed
- Incident logs - the things that went wrong and what you did about them
- Some evidence of a review of the system itself within a sensible cycle (annual is a typical default)
If your "QMS" is a policy document with no live records behind it, that's not what TPB(I) 48/2024 describes.
Why the obligation has teeth
The TPB has been clear in its public statements that this is part of a broader competence push, and breaches can lead to suspension or cancellation of registration. That's the stick. The carrot is that practices with a working QMS tend to spend less time firefighting and more time on the work that actually pays - which is the part I'd argue matters more than the regulatory bit.
PI insurers have also started asking for evidence of practice quality systems at renewal time. A documented QMS isn't only a TPB obligation now - it's increasingly an insurance one.
So where to from here
If you've been putting this off, the honest answer is to start with the risk register and the engagement letter process - they're the two pieces TPB auditors look at first and they're typically the most under-invested in small practices. Everything else can grow around those two anchors.
The other honest answer is that doing this in Word and Excel is technically possible but typically falls apart within six months because nobody updates the spreadsheets. A system that captures the records as a side-effect of the daily work, rather than as a separate "QMS admin" task, is going to survive much longer.
myQMS is one option in that space, but the broader point - regardless of which tool you use - is that the documentation needs to be a by-product of how you work, not an additional layer on top of it. If you're after a chat about your specific practice setup or what your current evidence trail looks like, I'm always happy to talk it through.