The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) may have to explain to a Parliamentary Committee why, when its resources are stretched, it has expended effort reviewing the operations of an independent statutory body, the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal (SCT).
The chairman of the Parliamentary Committee reviewing ASIC’s activities in light of its handling of events leading up to the Commonwealth Financial Planning enforceable undertaking, Senator David Bushby, confirmed he would be raising the SCT investigation exercise in the committee if the regulator did not provide the necessary answers to questions on notice.
He said that given the breadth of the inquiry into ASIC’s operations and performance – and confirmation that ASIC’s review of the SCT was not “formal” – such questions were justified.
Bushby has used a Senate Estimates Committee to extract confirmation from ASIC deputy chairman Peter Kell that the regulator had expended time and resources “looking at how the SCT operates”.
Kell said this was because “the SCT is within ASIC, effectively, in terms of funding. We have regular dialogue with the SCT about its operations and its funding. We thought that it was timely to conduct such a review”.
Asked by Bushby whether the options being examined by ASIC included “withdrawing SCT-specific funding by ASIC and rolling its activities more generally into ASIC or some other agency”, Kell said he would have to take the question on notice.
However, he acknowledged that there had been no industry consultations on the issue and claimed that if there were any proposals likely to affect the SCT’s operations in any significant way, “then we would as a matter of course talk more broadly to stakeholders, industry and government”.
Bushby last week confirmed to Money Management that the Parliamentary Committee was likely to range beyond ASIC’s handling of the Commonwealth Financial Planning enforceable undertaking to examine issues such as its handling of the Trio/Astarra collapse and Storm Financial.
