Australia’s financial services regulators would be performance-managed and held to key performance indicators (KPIs) under measures being actively canvassed by key financial services organisations.
The measures are aimed at ensuring that financial services organisations being levied to pay for the regulators can actually determine whether they are getting value for money.
The measures are revealed in an Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) submission to the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) dealing with measuring that organisation’s outcomes.
It comes at a time when the Government has moved to lift the level of financial services levies and indicated moves towards making the funding of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) fully user-pays.
It is also being proposed that any measurement of the performance of the regulators be undertaken by an independent third party agency, possibly the Australian National Audit Office.
What has been made clear in the submission is that the superannuation funds represented by ASFA want to be sure that they are getting value for money and that they want not only the performance of AUSTRAC measured, but also that of ASIC and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA).
“It was the strong view of our members that the industry needs to be involved in the design of the survey,” the submission said. “It was also felt that the surveys should be used to benchmark the relative performance of each regulator (APRA, ASIC and AUSTRAC) and that the survey findings should be publicly reported.”
“In addition, there was concern raised by ASFA members around the need to maintain the confidentiality of the organisations participating in the survey of the regulators’ performance,” the submission said. “In particular, our members felt that the surveys should be conducted by an independent third party. That is, the surveys should not be conducted by the relevant regulator or Treasury.”
It said that one possible suggestion was for the Auditor General’s Department to conduct the surveys.
