BDO adds six new partners in Australia to kick off the new year

Accounting and consulting firm BDO has added six new partners in Australia to begin the year, including four internal promotions and two new recruits in Chris Richardson and Ella White.

White and Richardson join BDO’s consulting and tax & business advisory teams in Melbourne from the respective partnerships of Deloitte and Findex, helping to lift BDO’s national total by around a sixth to almost 350 in the space of one year.

Meanwhile, Michelle Matchett, Mary Farquhar, and Mark Dunlop have been promoted to partner within BDO’s business services teams in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth, with Nick Howard also added as an audit & assurance partner in Melbourne.

“These appointments highlight the excellent calibre of people coming up through our strong pipeline of talent and our ability to attract outstanding professionals in a very competitive market,” said recently-installed chief executive David Garvey. “Each of these individuals has consistently demonstrated outstanding performance, innovative thinking, and commitment to our values.”

Ella White
White joins BDO after a decade and a half at Deloitte in Australia and the UK, most recently serving as strategy & transformation chief for audit & assurance after being made a partner in 2017. She specialises in regulatory change together with crisis management, with a focus on clients across the financial services sector, spanning banking, insurance, wealth management, and superannuation.

Chris Richardson
Having previously led its accounting & business advisory team in Melbourne, Richardson crosses after six years at Findex, before which he spent eight years between Deloitte and RSM. He provides specialist tax and business advisory services to mid-market and high-net-worth client, including those in the technology, professional services, healthcare, and consumer goods sectors.

Mark Dunlop
Dunlop joined BDO at the start of 2023 from Deloitte in London, having also previously spent two years with BDO’s Manchester office. Leveraging his experience gained in the UK, Dunlop supports Perth-based clients in the real estate & construction and not-for-profit sectors among others with their outsourced finance functions, including as to transformations and reviews.

Mary Farquhar
Farquhar has spent her entire career at BDO, joining the firm as a graduate over a decade ago following a commerce degree in accounting and finance with Monash University. She leads Melbourne’s outsourced statutory financial reporting function, providing high-level tax compliance services to medium-to-large international corporate clients operating subsidiaries in Australia.

Michelle Matchett
The third of BDO’s new business services partners, Matchett has more than two decades worth of accountancy experience under her belt, including since 2012 at BDO. She provides business and taxation advisory to a wide range of clients, including those in the aged care sector, family businesses and high-net-worth individuals, with an eye to financial reporting and compliance.

Nick Howard
Howard meanwhile joins BDO’s audit partnership after crossing to the firm in late 2024 following more than a decade at Deloitte, with an earlier lengthy stint spent at Ernst & Young. He has provided external audit services to ASX-listed, multinational and large private companies across his two-decade career, specialising in the tech, telco, logistics and healthcare sectors among others.