The Government is committed to cracking down on financial abuse. Financial abuse through coerced directorships is a growing concern in Australia. Treasury has released a consultation paper proposing options to:

• make it harder to register or appoint directors without their clear consent
• ensure victim-survivors can access defences for insolvency-related directors’ duties
• extend the timeframe to respond to Director Penalty Notices
• hold perpetrators to account for harm.

Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ) has lodged a submission which supports these aims and provides feedback on the various options in the consultation paper.

Drawing on the experience of members who work closely with affected individuals, CA ANZ stresses that coercive control is extremely difficult to identify—particularly when it occurs within intimate or family relationships. Even with strict identity and consent checks, accountants are not trained to diagnose coercion or financial abuse. Instead, their role is to recognise red flags, ask careful questions, manage conflicts of interest, and refer potential victim survivors to specialist support services. CA ANZ continues to raise awareness among members about how the tax system can be misused to facilitate financial abuse.

We also emphasise that law change must strike the right balance between ensuring safety and fairness for victim survivors and the need to reduce complexity and red tape to encourage greater economic efficiency.

CA ANZ calls for clearer, better coordinated roles across government agencies. For the ATO and ASIC, this includes preventing coerced director appointments, providing accessible channels for individuals to resign their directorship, forfeit their director ID, and using data to detect misconduct early. A critical gap in the consultation paper is how victim survivors can be seamlessly connected to the relevant agencies who can support them to recover their mental, social and financial health and become a survivor.