Stockbrokers become collateral damage in regulatory stuff-up

Members of the Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association (SIAA) have become collateral damage in the Government’s crack-down on the large audit firms by removing their access to a professional association pathway to registration with the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB).

The SIAA has written to Treasury complaining that the Government’s regulatory changes have failed to give any consideration to tax (financial) advisers who provide incidental tax advice solely to wholesale clients.

As a result, those advisers have been excluded from grandfathering onto the Financial Adviser Register (FAR).

The SIAA has complained that, instead, Treasury decided to include these advisers as tax agents registered with the TPB “even though they clearly do not provide the suite of services that tax agents provide”.

“SIAA’s members are a unique category of TPB registrants and rely on the professional association pathway as they play a fundamentally different role in the TPB ecosystem,” it said. “They typically do not have the education and qualifications that other TPB registrants have. Our members are not tax practitioners in the technical sense – they don’t prepare or lodge tax returns or BAS statements – yet they are caught up in the same regulatory regime.”

The SIAA said removing the professional association pathway will leave our members without a pathway to registration with the TPB as there is no other pathway that they could use.

“Grandfathering current TPB registrants is only a band-aid measure that does not address the underlying issue,” it said.

“While ever stockbrokers and investment advisers who provide incidental tax advice to wholesale clients are required to be registered with the TPB, the recognised professional association pathway must be retained.”

The SIAA reminded the Treasury of how recent regulatory intervention had imposed inflexible education and qualification standards on members of the financial advice industry.

“This intervention is slowly being unwound as government realises the detrimental and significant impact it has had on SIAA’s members and on Australians’ access to financial advice,” it said.

“If the government removes the recognised professional association pathway, it must provide a flexible and commonsense way for SIAA’s members who provide tax (financial) advice to wholesale clients only to continue to provide that advice in a way that complies with the law. If no alternative pathway is provided, then the recognised professional association pathway must be retained.”