Nominations for the 2024 DSPANZ Board Directors

Mike Behling
Senior Product Manager & Tax Liaison – MYOB Australia PTY LTD
Current Secretary of the DSPANZ Board

Mike joined DSPANZ (ABSIA) in 2014 and has played an active role since. Mike held a director’s position in DSPANZ from 2015 to 2021 and 2022 to current and has been the Company Secretary since 2015. During this time, he has represented the Tax Agent software industry in several forums.

Mike has been working in the Software industry for over 40 years in several disciplines. The last 23 years has been spent with MYOB, Solution 6 and Xlon. Most of this time has been devoted to the Accountants Tax Return preparation, management, and lodgment systems, more recently being involved in payroll, Business Management Software, and the use of SBR across the product Suite. Mike is also responsible for the MYOB API Connections to Inland Revenue New Zealand, MBIE (NZ) and ABR.

Since working with MYOB Mike has built up a good rapport with members of the ATO, ABRS, IRD and other people in the industry. Mike was a member of the Single Touch Payroll Advisory Group and has devoted many hours to help guide this program. More recently being engaged in the MBR Business Advisory Group recently disbanded after the Government stopped the program. Mike brought the proposal of the NZDAG to DSPANZ from a strong member in New Zealand and worked with the team in setting this up, continuing to be a member today.

Mike has often taken the lead with DPO and ATO project teams in driving the direction of the ATO testing environments with a goal to ensure the industry has appropriate standards of environments allowing easier development. 

The industry is getting busier as technology use accelerates and we all need to find better use of our resources.

Simone Dixon, CPS
Compliance Manager, Product - ELMO Software
Current Vice President of the DSPANZ Board

An established and driven business professional, with over 35 years’ experience in Finance, Payroll and HR within the Retail, Hospitality, Building, Mining, Recruitment, Labour Hire, Not for Profit and Software industries.

Simone has undertaken a diverse range of roles within her working life journey, from Sales Assistant and Bar Attendant to Financial Controller and Product Compliance Manager. This has provided her with a unique level of knowledge and clarity in the intricacy of business collaboration.

Her founding years were spent growing up in Canberra. Managing the family business, gave her a taste of the complexity of interpreting legislation. It became her passion to decipher the legal jargon and translate it into a language that was able to be understood by all.

Simone has always been proactive in her approach to grow her knowledge and is eager to share the results of her learnings, whether it be in an open forum event or internally with her peers. As Vice President of the DSPANZ board she encourages this knowledge share amongst DSPANZ members and acts as an industry voice for DSPANZ members.

As Vice President of DSPANZ over the past 12 months one of Simone’s representative activities was convincing DEWR, FWO and ATO to reconsider the regulations for reporting Paid Family and Domestic Violence leave. This resulted in a last-minute change to the regulations so that the intent of the legislation to protect the individual undergoing domestic violence was able to be built into software by the DSP community.