Built by Australian accountants
who left, too.

In 2006, Australian chartered accountant Shane Macfarlane moved to Kuala Lumpur to run teams of outsourced accountants for MYOB Accountants Resourcing - providing outsourced tax and accounting services to more than 600 accounting practices, of every size and scale, across Australia and New Zealand. It was a job with a rare vantage point: the inner workings of hundreds of Australian practices at once, and daily contact with the expat community around him.

And that community kept bringing him the same problem. Australian expats across the region sought Shane out for advice because they couldn't get what they needed from their accountants back home. Many who believed they were non-residents for Australian tax purposes were in fact tax residents. Many were over-paying tax, or under-paying it. Some were paying tax to the wrong country entirely. Others were missing massive opportunities available to them as non-residents - and exposing themselves to tax risks and traps, some of which they had no idea even existed.

After enough of those conversations, the lightbulb moment came: there was a massive gap in the market. Australian expats simply could not get the specialist, expert help they needed, and Shane, with deep Australian tax expertise and a front-row seat to the expat experience, was in exactly the right place to fill it. And so Expat Taxes Australia was born: a practice doing one thing properly - specialist tax advice for Australians living and working overseas, the right advice for each person's specific circumstances, at the right time. Word spread the way it always does in expatriate communities, at dinners, at international-school pickups, in airport lounges. Within two months it was a practice. Within twelve months, it had clients in over twenty countries.

Twenty years on, Expat Taxes has filed returns for Australians in 115 countries. In 2025 Shane returned to Australia with his wife, to be close to ageing parents and to family - based now just outside Melbourne, with regular travel back to Ho Chi Minh City and to client cities through the year. The move is for the season we're in; it is likely temporary. Terryn continues to file from Bogotá, Colombia, where his family lives. Between the seventeen years Shane has spent abroad and the eight Terryn has, the firm's centre of gravity has not changed: it sits with the lived experience of the work.

That is what this page is about. Not the firm in the abstract; the people who built it, and the geography - Australian, Asian, and Latin American - that we built it from.