Do you really need an accountant to do your tax return?
If no one has done so yet, let me be the first to wish you a happy end of financial year, a day I'm sure you've been counting down to on your calendar and staring wistfully out the window as you await its arrival. Well, wistfully stare no more, as we are officially in the 2026 fiscal year, and as the saying goes, it's tax return time baby!
If you don't think about all the tax you've paid for the past 12 months, getting your tax return is basically like free money (unless you end up owing tax, in which case, I have no silver lining for you).
Plus, with the awful weather in Sydney and Melbourne currently, what better time to curl up on the couch and start tallying up your deductions? You could even invite a friend!
What's the problem?
I am embarrassingly eager to do my return (if that's not obvious), but not everyone is so crazy about the idea. Data from the ATO shows roughly two thirds of Australians pay a tax agent to handle their affairs, while the remaining third of us do it ourselves. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is − Australia has one of the highest rates of tax agent use in the OECD.
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The tax office doesn't break down that data by age, but I'd bet that most people employing tax agents would be on the older side, while younger workers are more likely to do it themselves.
There are a few reasons for this, one of the biggest being that the online tax lodgement service, MyTax, has only been around for a decade or so, and its e-Tax predecessor was by all accounts a complete nightmare.
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