AU Accountants

My family and I officially became Australian Citizens this year. We are now dual citizens of both US and AU and boy, are there some major cultural differences, as well customer service, between these two countries since we’ve settled here in Australia.

We came here since 2017. Let me count how many Australian Accountants I’ve hired to do my taxes…. about 6. My taxes aren’t complicated, it’s the Australian Accountants being complicated is the main issue. As much as they’re required to have a CPA license to conduct accounting services, not many of them are actually knowledgeable when it comes to trading stocks, eg share investing. You would think that all accountants have the same or similar knowledge, nope they don’t. I find it more effective filing my own personal taxes for my family. All of the information can either be found on the ATO website or forums or investment/tax books. What’s interesting is that the accountants that I’ve engaged for their services are obstinate, stubborn, self-righteous, ignorant.

The accountants don’t consider my excel template with all of my logged trades to be considered as a source document, when they would rather use a FY Statement of all of the buy/sell trades instead.

How would they know at what Qty the buys/sells positions offset when calculating CGT when I’m either DCA (dollar-cost averaging) my Buy positions, or when I’m derisking my positions at different time periods? Why are they not including my trading cost commission when calculating my cost basis? Why are they not familiar with tax loss harvesting?

A few other mistakes the AU Accountants made when we were under the 457 visa:

• Medicare levy exemption- we were a foreign resident temporarily working in Australia

• Global/worldwide income- If you're an Australian resident for tax purposes and you have a temporary resident visa, you don’t pay tax on most of your foreign income in Australia (US Taxable Account/401Ks)

Go ahead and continue to call yourselves accountants then.