The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has provided comprehensive but heavily redacted documentation around the rental allowance controversy which led to the resignation of its deputy chair, Daniel Crennan, and which reveals it was all about ensuring the regulator had more than one commissioner in Sydney.
The provision of the documents to a Parliamentary Committee has also revealed that it was not the first time that ASIC had provided relocation assistance to commissioners, citing two instances where it had done so in the past but without naming the commissioners involved.
The documents noted that this had occurred notwithstanding the fact that “the relocation policy applies on its face to ‘team members’, and this definition does not include commissioners”.
Faced with this predicament, ASIC actually canvassed having the Remuneration Tribunal make a retrospective determination to cover Crennan’s circumstances
The documentation also notes that the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) raised serious questions about the nature of the arrangement as early as August, last year, and specifically mentioned that the arrangements should only apply to “team members” and that “past examples demonstrated that ASIC had previously only approved reimbursement of one-off costs associated with the relocation of commission members, rather than providing “ongoing” rental assistance.
The ASIC documentation, filed as part of its response to questions raised by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics reveals that Crennan was asked to relocate from Sydney to Melbourne because of the resignation of former ASIC deputy chair, Peter Kell, and that as part of the arrangement he was being provided with a rental allowance of $750 a week.
The documents also reveal that if the matter had not been raised and challenged by the ANAO Crennan would have been in receipt of the $39,000 a year rental allowance for a period of two years.
The documentation also reveals that issues were noted about the appropriateness of Crennan’s rental assistance arrangements as early as June, last year, noting that “in around June 2019, P&D identified a potential issue concerning the Relocation Package in respect of the fringe benefits tax (FBT) treatment of the Rental Assistance”.
It said “this led to the reconsideration of whether the Rental Assistance in fact complied with the framework governing the remuneration and benefits of ASIC’s statutory office holders”.
