An accountant and lawyer who chose to run a small firm.

Few people with Dr Sridaran’s background end up running a boutique firm. He is a chartered accountant and a lawyer, with a doctorate in Australian tax law and over 45 years across more than five countries, the early years with two of the Big Four, the last 25 in Australia. The expected path was a corner office at a global firm.

He chose the opposite. A practice deliberately kept small, where the technical depth of a big firm meets an adviser who knows your business by name.

Being both an accountant and a lawyer, he can carry a tax problem the whole distance, from day-to-day advice through to a tax-authority investigation and, where it must go that far, litigation. He taught tax law at Macquarie University, where the Faculty of Law named him its most knowledgeable teacher in his field, and has published in the Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald. His first book asked whether the rules are even fair: Are Capital Gains Equitably Taxed in Australia? His work is cited in the standard Australian university text, Australian Taxation Law.

One question runs through all of it: whether the tax system is fair to the people who pay it, and whether the received answer, even from the High Court or the Commissioner, is the right one. That is the standard of thinking he now applies to a deliberately small number of clients.

The rigour comes with a manner his clients describe in consistent terms: patient, generous with his time, and unfailingly courteous, even when the matter is hard. The fairness he argues for in print is the fairness he extends to the person across the table.