Tax deductibility of financial advice is one of the key goals for advocacy for the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA) as the regulator reviews take centre stage in 2022.
Ben Marshan, FPA head of policy, strategy and innovation, said tax deductibility and access to data were the main major advocacy goals for the organisation in 2022.
“We’ve got our policy platform, which we released in June last year and we’ve had a lot of success – we made 19 recommendations and six of those have now been implemented by the Government,” Marshan said.
“Because the focus on next will be on regulatory reviews there are a number of recommendations in our platform which will focus on advocating for improvements consumer protections and to the affordability of advice.”
Tax-deductible financial advice was part of the push to help make advice more affordable.
“The two big areas that are we definitely focusing on for next year to try and get some improvements – number one is tax deductibility of financial advice – we’ve been working on that for a few years and next year will be somewhat pivotal in trying to get that implemented,” Marshan said.
“Number two will be access to data – the consumer data right has been implemented and professional gateways have been opened.
“How that works for financial advisers is very important and we’re going to be advocating hard on getting access to the ATO [Australian Taxation Office] portals for financial planners and some form of access to Centrelink data and information for financial planners.”
The association also expected to appoint a new chief executive early next year as Dante De Gori, who announced his departure in July, would finish at the end of this year.
