On Thursday, the government will introduce laws to strengthen the independent Tax Practitioners Board.
In January, the former head of international tax at one of Australia's largest accounting firms was deregistered for leaking confidential government information.
Peter-John Collins, a former tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), was banned from the profession for two years.
He had been briefed confidentially by Treasury on measures to improve tax laws, including rules to stop multinationals avoiding tax by shifting profits from Australia to tax and secrecy havens.
An investigation found Mr Collins leaked the confidential information to some PwC partners and staff.
The tax board also found PwC failed to manage conflicts of interest, breached its legal obligations and the professional code of conduct.
PwC Australia acknowledged it should have had procedures to prevent such a breach.
The first tranche of reforms will provide stronger sanctions powers to the board, improve its information-gathering powers and enable it to publish more detailed reasons for sanctions and terminations on its register.
The laws will give the responsible minister the power to add elements to the code of professional conduct to address emerging behaviours not otherwise covered, ensure the board has the scope to hold tax agents to account and require tax practitioners to not employ or use a disqualified entity without board approval.
As well, they will close a loophole which allowed practitioners disqualified by the board to work for a qualified tax agent and give the board funding certainty.
Annual registration will enable tax agents to keep up to date with their registration requirements.
A report on reforms was handed to the coalition government in October 2019 but not acted on.
The Albanese government in its October budget gave the board an extra $30 million in funding to enable it to increase compliance investigations.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the government wanted to ensure consultation on policy is not compromised.
"In order for consultation to occur on policy there needs to be the right structures and there needs to be trust," he said.
"Breaches in confidentiality completely undermine our efforts to bring people together to tackle the big issues facing Australians."
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