The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has admitted it shelved a report about superannuation funds offering inducements to employers because it had too much work on at the time, including the Royal Commission.
The regulator has told a Parliamentary Committee that its so-called “Employers and Superannuation Project” had been shelved.
The project would have centred on superannuation funds offering incentives to employers to nominate their funds as default funds, with those incentives including hosting the employers at major sporting events such as the Australian Tennis Open.
However, ASIC told the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Corporations and Financial Services that it had “decided not to release a public report on the Project primarily because the demands of other work forced the superannuation team to narrow the project’s scope”.
Answering a question on notice from NSW Liberal Senator, Andrew Bragg, ASIC said that, instead, it had used other forums including the Royal Commission and the Productivity Commission to air the issues and its concerns.
“Rather than a public report, ASIC’s findings from the project have been communicated in different public avenues:
Submissions to the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry and the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry Report, Superannuation: Assessing Efficiency and Competitiveness;
- Input into law reform concerning section 68A of the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 (Cth);
- The publication of Infosheet 241 (released 31 July 2019), reminding trustees that using improper inducements to influence employers in their choice of default fund is illegal; and
- Information and messages provided to payroll providers, distributed in July 2019, through a number of payroll, transaction and business software industry groups and self-regulatory bodies”.
