Compliance
Can Australian tax agents use AI? What TPB guidance says
Yes — registered tax and BAS agents in Australia can use AI tools in their practice. But using AI does not reduce or transfer your professional responsibilities under the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) Code of Professional Conduct. You remain the adviser of record, and you must independently verify anything an AI produces before relying on it or giving it to a client.
The short answer
There is no rule that stops a registered tax agent or BAS agent from using artificial intelligence to research, model or draft. AI can speed up the routine parts of advisory work — summarising a client's position, surfacing relevant strategies, drafting an explanation. What it cannot do is take on your professional responsibility for the result.
The TPB has been clear that the Code of Professional Conduct applies regardless of the tools you use. Using AI does not lower the standard of competence, care or supervision expected of you. If an AI output is wrong and you pass it to a client, that is your error, not the tool's.
What the Code of Professional Conduct expects
The Code's core obligations map directly onto how you should treat AI output. In practice that means:
- Competence — you must understand the advice well enough to stand behind it. You cannot rely on an AI answer you could not have reached or checked yourself.
- Reasonable care — AI can hallucinate, cite outdated law, or miss a client-specific fact. Treat every figure and reference as a draft to be verified against authoritative sources (ATO, legislation, current rates).
- Confidentiality — be careful what client information you put into a general-purpose AI tool. Prefer tools that are clear about data handling, retention and where data is processed.
- Honesty and transparency — be straight with clients about how the advice was produced where it matters.
How to use AI safely in a tax practice
The practical test the TPB applies is whether you exercised your own professional judgement. A defensible workflow looks like this: use AI to do the modelling and the first draft, then review, verify and adjust before anything reaches the client — and keep a record that you did so.
That record matters. If a client outcome is ever questioned, being able to show that you verified the AI's output, and what you checked, is the difference between a defensible decision and an unverified one.
How Advisory Stack is built around this
Advisory Stack is a technology platform used by registered agents — not a registered tax agent service. You keep full control of the client relationship and remain the adviser of record. The platform is deliberately built so AI-assisted output is treated as general information to be verified, not advice:
- Every AI-assisted output is labelled as general information, not personal tax advice.
- A verify-before-you-advise acknowledgement is logged, so there is an evidence trail that you reviewed the output.
- Client data is hosted on Australian infrastructure, and we do not collect Tax File Numbers.
The bottom line
AI is a legitimate, and increasingly normal, tool in a modern tax practice. The professional responsibility never moves. Choose tools that make verification easy and that give you an evidence trail, use AI for the work it is good at, and apply your own judgement to everything before it reaches a client.
By the numbers
Some context on the regulatory backdrop, from primary Australian sources:
- The Tax Practitioners Board released exposure draft TPB(I) D62/2026, "The use of Artificial Intelligence and the Code of Professional Conduct", in March 2026; submissions closed on 21 April 2026 (Tax Practitioners Board).
- As at 30 June 2025 there were 63,865 registered tax practitioners in Australia (Tax Practitioners Board, Annual Report 2024-25).
- In April 2026 the ATO warned taxpayers that "AI can be helpful, but it often draws from a broad and inconsistent range of sources, which can lead to inaccurate advice" and may draw "content about tax obligations or laws from outside of Australia or outdated sources" (Anita Challen, ATO Assistant Commissioner, 30 April 2026).
Authoritative sources
This article is general information for registered practitioners, not personal tax advice. Advisory Stack is a technology platform used by registered tax agents; the registered practitioner remains the adviser of record and is responsible for verifying any output before relying on it.
Related guides
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