When the family finances are weaponised for financial abuse

A joint bank account. A company registration with two names. A family trust set up in good faith. For most couples building a life or a business together, pooling money is simply what a partnership looks like. But for a significant number of Australians, those same structures become the mechanism through which one partner controls, isolates and financially ruins the other.

Government data highlights the scale of this problem. The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2021–22 Personal Safety Survey found that 16% of women and 7.8% of men had experienced economic abuse from a cohabiting partner since the age of 15, equivalent to roughly 1.6 million women and 745,000 men nationally. The impacts of financial abuse incur an estimated $5.7 billion in direct costs for victims and $5.2 billion in costs for the broader economy, according to research commissioned by Commonwealth Bank and conducted by Deloitte Access Economics. Furthermore, an Australian Institute of Criminology survey of more than 1000 women who had experienced coercive control found that financial abuse ranked among the most commonly reported behaviours, alongside jealousy, insults and the monitoring of movements.

Ann Kayis-Kumar, Professor of Taxation Law and Policy at UNSW Business School and the Founding Director of the UNSW Tax and Business Advisory Clinic, has spent years documenting how ordinary financial arrangements are turned into a means of abuse. Speaking with Dr Juliet Bourke, Adjunct Professor in the School of Management and Governance at UNSW Business School for The Business Of, a UNSW Business School podcast, she explained how financial abuse originates, why it so often escapes detection, and what accountants, lawyers and financial planners can do to stop being unwitting participants in it.

What is financial abuse, and who does it affect?

Prof. Kayis-Kumar defined the problem in direct terms. “Financial abuse is a pattern of sabotage, exploitation, and restriction of money in an intimate partner relationship, and that’s where we’ve seen it most pointedly at the tax clinic,” said Prof. Kayis-Kumar, who was careful to stress that financial abuse crosses every demographic line.

“Unfortunately, anyone can be a perpetrator, and anyone can be a victim or survivor, and it has nothing to do with education levels or socioeconomic status,” she explained. “It’s a power dynamic, it’s about money and power and control.”

Learn more: How to identify and support women facing economic abuse

She suggested the true numbers were probably higher, since victim survivors themselves often struggled to recognise what was happening to them. Social expectations play a part, too. Joint bank accounts and shared business structures are treated as a normal part of marriage or partnership, which is precisely what allows them to be turned against a victim once a perpetrator sets out to do so.

How has understanding of the problem changed?

The UNSW Tax and Business Advisory Clinic began screening clients for domestic violence in 2019. Prof. Kayis-Kumar’s own introduction to the issue came earlier, through a student placement at the Kingsford Legal Centre’s domestic violence clinic. She explained: “That was such a formative experience for me, and it really opened my eyes to the fact that domestic violence isn’t just the physical; it can be really damaging and have a really long tail at a financial level, and in fact, post-separation, that’s when financial abuse escalates.”

Prof. Kayis-Kumar said research shows it can take roughly seven attempts for a person to leave a domestic violence situation, and economic instability is one of the reasons victims return to a perpetrator. Once the clinic began screening for economic abuse alongside domestic violence, she said that between 60 and 80% of the clinic’s female clients self-reported experiencing both domestic violence and financial abuse – a pattern that has held steady since screening began and has since shaped the clinic’s research and advocacy work.

Prof. Kayis-Kumar traced this back to family business structures used for tax purposes. Where a husband and wife are both involved in a business, but one partner holds most of the decision-making power and account access, that imbalance can be a warning sign, and it can be exploited after separation. The issue has drawn the attention of policymakers through the Commonwealth’s systems abuse audit, precisely because accountants, lawyers and tax practitioners can be drawn into the pattern without realising it, and because the Australian Taxation Office and ASIC’s business registers can be misused to pursue victims for debts they never created.

How do you know when it has crossed the line?

Many relationships have historically involved one partner, often the husband, managing the household finances without any intention to cause harm. Dr Bourke asked how anyone tells the difference between a traditional arrangement and coercive control, and Prof. Kayis-Kumar explained that cultural expectations are exactly what make the slide so hard to detect.

To help people identify the pattern, the clinic has compiled five red flags of financial abuse. The first is controlling access, meaning restricted access to bank accounts, business income and tax information. The second is hiding money, where income or assets are kept secret from a partner. The third is shifting debts onto the victim survivor’s name, which can appear in banking arrangements or, specifically, in the creation of tax debts.

Prof. Kayis-Kumar explained how one person could put a debt in another’s name without documentation, and she described a system built on trust rather than verification. “Unfortunately, it’s very easy because we don’t have a system designed with safety at the forefront,” she said. “Rather, there’s just an assumption that everyone’s going to do the right thing, and that if someone’s signature appears on a document, it’s usually taken as given.”

She described a case where a perpetrator created a fake email account in his ex-wife’s name and instructed the accountant on her behalf, an accountant who never verified her identity and accepted the excuse that she was too busy with the children to attend appointments. That experience, Prof. Kayis-Kumar said, points to the need for “know your client” hygiene within the profession, rather than treating a document signed by one partner as evidence that both partners were informed and consulted.

The fourth red flag follows from that gap: decisions made without the victim survivor present at all, so that he/she is used rather than consulted. The fifth is inaccessible or unclear information, where business structures and financial arrangements are built to block visibility rather than provide the transparency a genuine partnership requires.

What about superannuation?

Superannuation, Prof. Kayis-Kumar said, had not registered as a risk area for the clinic until relatively recently. “This wasn’t on our radar until just recently this year and late last year, when we had a number of clients who came to us, all women, all victim survivors, who some of them didn’t even realise that an SMSF had been created in their name,” she explained.

In one case, a client’s superannuation balance had been moved out of an APRA-regulated fund and into a self-managed super fund that was subsequently drained by the perpetrator. She received a red letter (the most serious category the Australian Taxation Office issues) informing her that the SMSF had been non-compliant for five years, carrying penalties of roughly $16,000 per breach and a potential prison term of up to 12 months, despite her having no knowledge that the fund existed and no access to its trust deed.

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The scale of the wider problem is significant. The Australian Taxation Office told the SMSF Association's national conference in February 2026 that an estimated $252 million was accessed illegally from self-managed super funds in the 2022–23 financial year, up slightly from the previous year. Relationship breakdown was cited as one of the three leading reasons behind illegal early access cases.

Are professionals unwittingly enabling this?

Dr Bourke asked directly whether accountants, lawyers and financial planners might be facilitating abuse without knowing it. “Unfortunately, that is a risk,” Prof. Kayis-Kumar said. She referenced academic work which analysed victim-survivor submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Committee’s financial abuse inquiry and found that accountants and lawyers were the two professions most commonly named by perpetrators seeking to carry out abuse.

For such professionals, Prof. Kayis-Kumar pointed to practices that have become so routine they no longer register as unusual. “This is really challenging, because it goes to what we have so easily normalised as professionals,” she said. “So, having only the husband in the room, for example, where you’re advising a family business, and trusting that he’s going to get his wife to sign the documents and bring them back to you. Or only having conversations with him, because you know she’s at home, or she’s busy, or whatever else. It’s so easy for a perpetrator to make it seem so innocent.”

"It’s a power dynamic, it’s about money and power and control"

ANN KAYIS-KUMAR

Prof. Kayis-Kumar described the reaction professionals often have once they recognise the pattern in their own practice. At the end of sessions raising awareness of financial abuse, individuals have come forward either to disclose their own experience as a victim-survivor or to reflect on situations in which they had unknowingly played a part.

One partner at a professional services firm, she recalled, told her that for three years he had not picked up on the dynamic between a husband and wife he was advising, and became visibly affected while recounting it. Prof. Kayis-Kumar’s reading of that reaction was that professionals do not set out to be complicit. “For the vast majority of people, we don’t have, thank goodness, a situation where people are deliberately trying to misuse systems,” she said.

Key takeaways for business professionals

For accountants, lawyers, financial planners and anyone advising family businesses, the podcast pointed to four practical changes worth adopting:

• Treat every party to a family business or trust as an individual client with an independent right to information, rather than defaulting to whichever partner is more available or more assertive.
• Insist on direct contact and verified identity for both partners before accepting instructions or signatures, rather than allowing one partner to relay documents on behalf of the other. Check that distributions and transfers are actually reaching an account the recipient can access, since a distribution declared but not received still creates a personal tax liability.
• Build awareness of the five red flags identified by the UNSW Tax and Business Advisory Clinic, controlling access, hiding money, shifting debts, exclusion from decisions, and inaccessible information, into standard client review processes for family businesses and self-managed super funds.
• Recognise that self-managed super funds have become a growing area of risk, given the scale of illegal early access already being tracked by the Australian Taxation Office.

Finally, understand that raising awareness of these patterns costs a business little, while the alternative, being unknowingly mobilised as a tool of abuse, carries professional, reputational and, for the victim survivor, potential life-altering consequences.

If this article has raised concerns for you or someone you know, support is available through 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732), a free, national domestic violence hotline operating 24 hours a day, and through the Financial Abuse Service NSW at Redfern Legal Centre.