Hire the preparation layer, not the signature. An offshore accountant for an Australian firm should be reconstructing cost bases and building the asset register your clients need at 30 June 2027, while your registered people keep the judgement and the sign off. That split survives a professional standards review.
Most principals will not make the call until the work has eaten a year of senior capacity. Outstaffer charges for the fix, so read this as disclosure: recruiting into that layer is a service we sell.
What actually changes on 1 July 2027
The Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026 replaces the 50 percent capital gains tax discount with cost base indexation and a 30 percent minimum tax on real gains. In his second reading speech of 28 May 2026 the Treasurer said investors will index the cost base to inflation and pay tax only on real profit. Gains up to that date keep the old discount, and Treasury's explainer calls the change entirely prospective.
Prospective is the expensive word.
Nothing is grandfathered away. Every CGT asset a client holds on 30 June 2027 picks up a second history that runs beside the first for as long as they own it.
Does this hit every client, or only the wealthy ones?
Every client holding a CGT asset for more than twelve months. The reforms reach individuals, partnerships and trusts. A rental property, a parcel of shares, a slice of partnership goodwill: each needs a defensible position at the changeover, whether the client sells in 2028 or 2048.
Why an offshore accountant is a capacity decision, not a cost one
Here is the arithmetic, and it is a payroll story, not a tax one.
The ABS puts average weekly ordinary time earnings for full time adults in professional, scientific and technical services at $2,389.60 in May 2026. That is $124,259 a year. Add super at the 12 percent rate running through 2026-27 and one qualified body costs about $139,170 before a desk, a licence or software.
Now decide what that person spends 2027 doing. Cost base reconstruction is retrieval, reconciliation and record keeping. It does not bill at advisory rates, and it repeats every year.
Nobody will issue a fee note for the second history. What a properly employed remote hire costs once compliance and equipment are counted is worth checking first.
What an offshore accountant for an Australian firm cannot do
Sign anything. Give the advice. Hold the tax agent registration. Carry the professional indemnity.
Upstream of that line everything else is available: the register, the reconciliations, the workpapers a senior reviews in twenty minutes rather than builds in four hours. Which roles should move first depends on where demand already strains you, and in 2027 that is preparation.
Can they hold the client relationship?
No, and asking them to is how firms sour on the idea. The relationship stays with the name on the engagement letter.
The honest case for keeping all of it in house
The strongest counter is that this work carries real judgement. Deciding whether a cost base is defensible is not data entry, and a preparer who does not know the rules will build a register that looks complete and is wrong. Firms that retreated usually retreated for that reason.
Fair. It argues for a properly employed person on your own team, trained on your files, rather than a shared seat at an agency splitting attention across five firms. It does not argue for absorbing the work into people you cannot replace.
Related reading
- The hidden cost of getting your first offshore hire wrong
- Two of your thirty staff already work somewhere else
What I would do before the 2027 register closes
Count the CGT assets across your client base. Not the clients. The assets. That number is your 2027 workload and it is knowable today.
Then decide who builds it. If the answer is the same three seniors who are already the constraint, you have made a resourcing decision by default. Run one role through and see what comes back, or keep every hour in house with your eyes open. An offshore accountant for an Australian firm is not the cheap answer. It is the one that stops your scarcest people spending 2027 on record keeping.
Get advice on your own firm's exposure before you resource it. How many principals could give that asset count without opening a file?
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