How AI tax and financial advice is costing Australian businesses

According to new research by Dext, based on a survey of 500 accountants and bookkeepers across Australia, 63 per cent of respondents were aware of businesses that had been negatively affected by direct financial losses, including overpayments, missed allowances, penalties, fines, or compliance issues, as a result of incorrect or misleading AI-generated advice.

The findings indicated that public AI adoption across Australia is accelerating at the moment. However, the misuse of these tools in complex financial decisions has ultimately created a costly, ongoing risk that continues to grow.

As more firms treat AI outputs as reliable guidance, accountants' and bookkeepers' fears have intensified.

The findings suggested that public AI adoption is accelerating across Australia, but that misuse of these tools for complex financial decisions is creating a growing and costly risk.

Paul Wittich, general manager in APAC at Dext, said that businesses were already losing money and that accountants and bookkeepers are spending valuable time correcting avoidable mistakes.

“Across the country, businesses are already losing money, and accountants and bookkeepers are spending valuable time correcting avoidable mistakes, from tax and payroll errors to misinterpretation of expenses,” Wittich said.

“AI has a powerful role to play in finance but there’s a fundamental difference between specialist tools built for accounting and bookkeeping, and general-purpose chatbots that don’t know a business’s true financial context.”

The research showed that 75 per cent of accountants and bookkeepers said they have seen an increase in clients using public AI tools, such as ChatGPT and other large language models, to seek financial, tax, or bookkeeping advice.

Yet this increasing reliance has led to a sharp rise in errors, with consequences already evident in clients' finances.

In an interview with Accounting Times, Wittich expressed the necessity of striking a balance between utilising AI tools and actually using the brain to do work.

“It’s a tricky one, everyone out there at the moment is trying to figure [the balance] out,” he said.

With concerns mounting, accountants and bookkeepers are calling for urgent intervention.

Ninety-two per cent believed regulation and restrictions are needed, with 48 per cent saying public AI tools should be restricted from providing financial or tax-related advice, and 69 per cent called specifically for formal regulation.

Wittich said that businesses preferred to regulate how the technology is used rather than impose heavy restrictions on the technology itself.

“We’ve got to protect consumers and small businesses against what can be pretty fundamental mistakes,” he said.

Yet Wittich noted that AI offers significant efficiency benefits for businesses, and that imposing restrictions would be undesirable.

“The last thing anyone wants to do is damage and take away productivity gains, you’ve got to put the guardrails around the action rather than the tools themselves.”

Wittich found that the primary reason companies used AI, rather than seeking professional advice, was purely a cost-based decision.

“For small businesses, it’s just another line in the accounts,” he said. “If there’s a way of mitigating that cost, they do that.”

Accountants like Wittich have warned that businesses are losing money due to an over-reliance on general-purpose AI for financial advice, according to Dext research across Australia.

The study found widespread errors, including incorrect tax claims, payroll mistakes, and compliance issues, with most respondents encountering client errors weekly or daily, which can result in insolvency risks and regulatory scrutiny.

“We’re all using it more and more and loving it, we just need to be a little bit cautious.”