Right. Let’s talk about your 2026 Australian tax return.
I know. I can already feel you reaching for the close button.
Tax returns are not what you signed up for when you took the job in Singapore, or the contract in London, or the visa in Dubai. You signed up for the adventure. The harbour views. The annual trip home loaded with duty-free.
You did not sign up to spend a Saturday afternoon trying to work out whether your UK rental property gets reported in Schedule X or Schedule Y, or whether your foreign employer’s superannuation-equivalent fund is, in the eyes of the ATO, a foreign superannuation fund, a foreign trust, or possibly a sentient lifeform with its own tax obligations.
But here we are. June 30 is coming. And the ATO does not care that you’re in Doha.
Look, let me save you some time
If you’re an Australian expat and you’ve been doing your own tax returns from overseas, one of three things is true:
One. You’re doing them brilliantly and you don’t need me. Congratulations. Close this tab.
Two. You think you’re doing them brilliantly, but you’re not. The ATO has not noticed yet. They will.
Three. You’re not doing them at all because the whole thing feels too hard, and there’s a quiet voice at the back of your head that says “she’ll be right.” She will not be right. She is, in fact, accruing penalties as we speak.
If you’re in category one, fantastic. If you’re in two or three, keep reading.
What expatriate tax actually looks like
Tax in one country is annoying. Tax across two countries is something else entirely.
You’ve got Australian residency rules that haven’t been properly updated since the Howard era. You’ve got source rules. You’ve got double tax treaties that say one thing in the actual treaty and another thing in the Commentary. You’ve got the ATO’s view, your host country’s view, and the gap between them where money disappears.
You’ve got the Main Residence Exemption, which used to apply to non-residents until it didn’t. You’ve got HECS/HELP debt that follows you across the international date line and everywhere else. You’ve got the foreign income tax offset, which sounds simple until you actually try to calculate it.
You’ve got foreign superannuation. You’ve got Division 296. You’ve got CGT on shares you bought at university, reinvested the dividends on for 20 years, and now have no idea what the cost base is.
And, if you’re really unlucky, you’ve got an Australian rental property, vested RSUs sitting in a US/foreign brokerage account, and perhaps a partner whose citizenship may be different to yours.
This is not a job for software. This is not a job for the bloke at the local accountant in Melbourne who “had a couple of expat clients a few years back.” This is a job for someone who does this every single day, for thousands of people, in over a hundred countries.
Which, conveniently, is what we do
We’ve been preparing Australian tax returns for expats for over 20 years. That’s not 20 years of “occasionally dabbling.” That’s 20 years of waking up every morning and thinking about expatriate tax for Australians overseas and for foreign citizens in Australia. We look after clients in around 115 countries (at last count). We’ve seen the weird stuff. We’ve seen the very weird stuff. There is almost no expatriate tax situation that we haven’t seen at least once, and if yours is genuinely a first, we’re just nerdy enough to enjoy figuring it out.
We are registered tax agents (TAN 25220543, if you’re the type to check, and you should be). We are members of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand. We hold a Certificate of Public Practice.
None of that, on its own, is interesting. Plenty of accountants tick those boxes. So let me tell you what’s actually different.
We charge fixed fees. We refuse to charge hourly rates.
This is the bit we get most heated about, so bear with me.
Most accountants charge by the hour. Think about what that means. The slower they work, the more they earn. The more they have to research how the rules work for expatriates, the more they earn. The more confused they get, the more they earn. The longer they spend on the phone to the ATO, the more they earn.
You are paying them to be inefficient.
It’s the only industry I can think of where the service provider’s lack of efficiency, lack of knowledge or in some case, plain incompetence, incompetence is literally a revenue model. Imagine if your plumber charged you more for taking longer because they had to research and learn how to fix a leak. You’d never hire that plumber again. And yet, somehow, the accounting industry has convinced an entire country that this is normal.
We don’t do that. We charge fixed fees. About 70% of our tax return clients pay the same base, standard fee. If your situation is more complicated, we add increments to cover that complexity. But you’ll know the number before we start. You will never get a surprise bill from us. Ever.
The money-back guarantee. Yes, really.
I know what you’re thinking. “A money-back guarantee from an accountant. Sure.”
I get it. Most professionals would rather chew tinfoil than offer a refund. But here we are.
If we provide you with a service and you’re not satisfied with it, you get your money back. No questions, no forms in triplicate, no “let me speak to my manager.” Just a refund. (You have to ask within 30 days, and payment processing fees aren’t refundable because we can’t get those back ourselves. Otherwise, no fine print.)
Why do we do this? Because we know that engaging a new accountant from the other side of the world is a leap of faith. We’d rather take the risk off you, and trust that we’ll do good enough work that you won’t ever want to claim.
To date, very few people have claimed. We take that as a sign we’re doing something right.
Free support, almost without limit
Most accountants charge you to think about you.
You email them with a quick question. They open the email. The meter starts running. They reply. You ask a further question. They reply. The meter is still running. Three weeks later you get an invoice for of an hour or more of time.
We don’t do that either.
If we prepare your tax return, you can email us, message us, call us, or book a free 30-minute “General Enquiry” appointment with any of our senior tax team, and as long as we can answer the question within that 30-minute window, we will not charge you. Doesn’t matter how valuable the answer is to you. Doesn’t matter if it saves you ten thousand dollars. If we can answer in 30 minutes, it’s free.
If we can’t answer in 30 minutes (some questions genuinely require more work), we’ll give you a fixed quote in advance, and you can decide whether to proceed. No surprises.
The only thing we charge separately for is ATO audits, because audits are genuinely awful, soul-destroying work, and we’re not running a charity. The ATO secretly enjoys them. The rest of us would rather have dental surgery.
Every paid consultation includes a free hour
One more thing, because I want you to fully understand the deal here.
Every paid tax consultation you book with us includes a free one-hour follow-up consultation, at any time of your choosing (subject to our team’s availability).
So if you book a residency consultation, or an “outbound expat” consultation, or a “returning home” consultation, you get the original meeting plus a follow-up meeting six months later when you’ve actually done the thing and you’ve got new questions. That’s included. You don’t pay extra.
I’m not aware of any other firm that does this. There’s probably a reason.
So. About your 2026 tax return.
Here’s the offer.
Book a free 30-minute appointment with Shane Macfarlane CA or Terryn Davidow CPA. The two principals of the firm. No junior, no salesperson, no offshore call centre.
In that half hour, we’ll work out:
Whether you actually need to lodge a return this year (some expats don’t, and we’ll tell you straight). What information we’ll need from you. What the likely fee will be (fixed, agreed before we start). What the tax outcome is likely to look like. Any planning opportunities we can spot in the time available.
That’s it. No obligation. No upsell. No “we’ll send you a proposal and then call you 14 times.” If we’re a good fit, we’ll get started. If we’re not, no harm done.
The appointment is free because we genuinely believe the best way to win clients is to demonstrate, before any money changes hands, that we know what we’re doing. We’ve been doing it this way for nearly two decades. It works.
One last thing
If you’re reading this and you’re three years behind on your tax returns, take a breath. We see it constantly. You are not the first person to discover that “I’ll sort it out next month” is a remarkably durable lie.
We’re the only firm I know of that will actually offer a small discount in this scenario, because if we can do multiple years at once, we save some time, and we’d rather share that saving with you and build a long-term relationship than charge you the full whack and never hear from you again.
So if you’re sitting on three (or five, or seven) years of unlodged returns, book the appointment anyway. We’ve seen worse. We’ll get it sorted.
Book your free 2026 tax return appointment
Pick whichever of us suits your schedule:
Or browse all our consultation types on our appointments page.
Times shown will be in your local timezone (we’ll figure it out from your browser, you don’t need to do anything clever).
If you can’t find a suitable time, or you’d rather just send a quick message first, our team is on info@expattaxes.com.au, or you can reach us via WhatsApp.
And if you want to know what other expats have made of us before you commit, we’ve got over 340 verified five-star reviews on Endorsal. Have a read. We’ll wait.
See you in the meeting.
