ASIC looks to beef up breach reporting regime
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has flagged a sector-by-sector approach to improving compliance with its reportable situations regime, citing the failings of superannuation fund, Cbus as a prompt.
The sector-by-sector approach follows an ASIC review which found that licensees have been generally slow to report to ASIC and that most of the licensees reviewed had gaps in how they monitor their own compliance.
The ASIC review covered 14 licensees in different sectors who had low numbers of reportable situations or had not reported at all.
ASIC commissioner, Kate O’Rourke cited recent legal proceedings filed against United Super the trustee of Cbus as having highlighted what ASIC expects of licensees, regardless of size.
She said that the reportable situations regime represented a priority area for ASIC in 2024-25 and that it will be consulting stakeholders on options for future granular reporting to provide deeper insights.
“In addition, we will do further work next year to consider how best to ensure ASIC receives the reports that have the most intelligence value to us, while managing the burden on industry from reporting,” O’Rourke said.
“We will also undertake a range of work on a sector-by-sector basis to monitor and uplift compliance with the regime and consider enforcement action where necessary.”
As part of its efforts to further uplift compliance with the regime, ASIC has today published insights, key questions and a set of best practice examples for licensees to reflect on and inform changes to better meet their obligations under the regime.
Advisers can do no right in ASICs eyes.
Regardless of Advice businesses that have no complaints to report because we have happy & satisfied clients.
Reporting no complaints to ASIC sees ASIC complain about no Adviser complaints.
The Kill Advisers for anything attitude of ASIC is proven yet again.
ASIC should review the case and properly investigate the financial planner they crucified (lost their houses, savings and nearly lost his family and suffered significant distress through this experience until now) for alleged churning of insurance products. Through some bogus complaint (severely manipulated & incomplete information) regarding this financial planner, they alleged the financial planner churned insurance products and put his clients into an inferior product and claimed commissions from it (His superiors received the commissions as per evidence, not him, he was an employee). Turns out, this financial planner had no choice to represent himself at the AAT (no funds to hire a lawyer or barrister, spent $400k), Evidence shows new life insurance products clearly had more features and benefits and monthly premiums was significantly lower and had a reference number before assessment for every single file. Materials was severely manipulated to make it look like this financial planner was a crook. This financial planner had no compliance breaches, 100 plus good character references from the community and industry & had all the awards, 3 independent experts was hired to investigate the matter and turns out there was no formal / verbal warning of any breaches and other financial planners were doing it and still practising. The transfer form provided was the incorrect form. The correct transfer form was generated after this financial planner left.
When the truth started to surface, executives and including ASIC delegate who ruined this financial planner’s life, retired/resigned and employed somewhere else. ASIC has ruined this person’s life including his family (I am sure ASIC staff have families themselves) by not investigating this matter thoroughly & properly, they simply relied on materials provided to them. Lastly, they alleged 49 client files was churned, however, when this financial planner, decided to represent himself and directly asked for the 49 client files so he can thoroughly investigate his matter, he has only received 20 client files, until now remaining 29 files have not been presented. Information on the judgement states, “retraining & monitoring this financial planner was a better option considering the truth was revealed”. ASIC need to take accountability for their significant errors and correct this.
With no legal background, this planner represented himself against ASIC for 2days to show them the truth, he was by himself and had the courage to do it.