Your client base is full of financial abuse. Here's what to look for

There is a line I have heard from accountants and financial advisers more times than I can count, usually delivered with genuine pride: "We always make sure both partners are in the meeting."

I understand the intention. It is not enough.

If one in four Australian women has experienced economic abuse by a partner, then in a practice with 100 couples on your client list, you are almost certainly sitting across from women who do not have genuine independent access to the finances you are reviewing together. Some of them are being actively monitored in that meeting. Some of them are not safe to speak freely. Some of them will have their answers guided, corrected, or completed by the person sitting beside them before they can open their mouths.

Presence in a room is not a financial agency. An invitation to a meeting is not safe.

May is Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month in Australia. Financial abuse — the systematic restriction of a person's access to money, income, assets, and economic decision-making — is legally recognised as a form of domestic violence. It is also the form most likely to go undetected by financial professionals, because it doesn't look like bruises. It looks like a joint account she can't access independently. It looks like an offset account in his name that was set up during the busy chaos of a property settlement and never updated. It looks like a financial adviser relationship that one partner manages entirely, with the other present but not participating. It looks, in other words, like a lot of normal client files.

The financial services industry was built in an era when women couldn't open bank accounts without a husband's signature. The last of those laws changed in the 1970s. The professional assumptions — the defaults, the habits, the instinct to treat a couple as a single financial unit — have not kept pace. This is not a personal failure. It is a structural inheritance that the profession has not yet examined carefully enough.

Here is what trauma-informed financial practice actually requires, and it is not complicated:

Does she have her own account with her own independent access — not just access to a joint account? Does she have her own relationship with your practice, or does all communication go through him? Are there conversations that should happen separately? Is the financial structure in this household protecting both people equally, or primarily one?

These are not intrusive questions. They are professional ones. And in a practice that serves couples, they are overdue.

The data that sits behind this is not ambiguous. One in three Australian women has stayed in a relationship she wanted to leave because she couldn't afford to go. Women who out-earn their male partner are 35 per cent more likely to experience domestic violence — not less. One woman is killed by a current or former intimate partner every nine days in Australia. Twenty-two women have already been killed in 2026.

These are not statistics about other people's clients. They are statistics about ours.

I am a Fellow Chartered Accountant. I have sat across tables from clients whose financial structures told stories their words didn't. I have seen the architecture of financial dependence built from decisions that were each, individually, completely reasonable — the salary into the joint offset, the investment account managed by one partner, the adviser relationship that only one of them really has. None of those decisions required bad intent to create dependency. They just required someone to be paying more attention to financial optimisation than to financial safety.

The accounting profession prides itself on acting in clients' best interests. This month is an invitation to ask whether our processes actually reflect that — for both people in the room.

The Zahra Foundation provides free financial counselling and recovery support for women leaving domestic abuse. Our Watch has practitioner resources on recognising financial abuse in professional settings. If you have strong feelings about where to start: start there.

Shaye Thyer is a Fellow Chartered Accountant and Consulting CFO.