AMP predicts it will be a law-beaker
AMP Limited has warned it will be in breach of the Government’s proposed new legislation aimed at modernising membership and share register settings – the Corporations Amendment (Modernisation of Members Registration) Bill because it only has email addresses for 34 per cent of its 770,000 shareholders.
The big financial services group has told the Senate Economics Committee that enacting the legislation will see AMP and companies like it in almost immediate breach.
“The bill, if enacted, will create a mandatory requirement for the register of all companies to contain the email addresses of all its members. As AMP holds email addresses for only 34 per cent of its shareholders, AMP will be in breach of the proposed amendment upon the bill’s enactment and, despite its best endeavours, AMP is unlikely to ever be compliant,” the company said in a submission to the Senate committee.
“We have estimated the costs associated with a separate mail out to our 500,000 shareholders, who have not provided us with an email address, requesting this information from them,” it said. “This exercise is likely to cost AMP around $800,000 including printing, mailing costs and processing.”
“This is a waste of resources which is unlikely to result in any additional email addresses being collected,” the AMP submission said.
It said a campaign conducted in 2016 to collect additional email addresses only resulted in 40,000 additional email addresses being collected.
“In addition, the average age of our shareholders is 75 years and in our experience, many older shareholders do not have an email address,” it said.
“Therefore, the retrospective collection of this data from shareholders is not feasible,” the submission said. “In addition, ongoing compliance with maintaining the accuracy of shareholder emails on the register is likely to be challenging and costly for companies.”
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