You helped a client register a company. Quick admin job done? Not necessarily. That one service could place your practice directly inside the scope of the FIC Act, with compliance duties, reporting obligations, and a looming 30 June 2026 deadline many accountants are still unaware of. In this article, we look at who really needs to register with the FIC, what Directive 11 means for practitioners, and the costly mistake many firms may already be making without realising it.

Many accounting practices discover a strange outcome when implementing their Risk Management and Compliance Programme under the FIC Act. After carefully designing a risk scoring model, almost every client ends up classified as high risk. This usually happens because firms assign too much weight to the services they provide, particularly where company secretarial or TCSP activities are involved. The result is a model that does not distinguish between genuinely higher risk clients and ordinary local businesses. A proper risk based approach should assess multiple factors such as the client profile, geographic exposure, services provided, and transaction behaviour to produce a balanced and practical assessment of risk.