Accountants deserve financial advice authority: submission
Accountants are more qualified to give financial advice than planners, largely due to their working knowledge of self-managed superannuation funds (SMSFs), a small business owner believes.
In a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services, sole practitioner and accountant Keith Compton called for an extension to accountants' advising powers because of perceived knowledge gaps when it came to advisers around complex investment and tax schemes.
"Yes the planner may know where and how to invest a fund's monies — albeit with their preferred investment organisation, but other than that they generally have a limited knowledge of the day-to-day matters affecting a self-managed fund," he said.
Compton dismissed the need for a financial adviser step in when a client establishes or closes an SMSF and said accountants could manage the procedure adequately alone.
"Accountants in practice should be able to retain their ability to provide common sense advice as to the setting up, running and organisation of a self-managed fund, without the need to include another level of advice from an adviser who it may be argued would provide very little additional comfort," he said.
"After all, we have been doing it for a long time."
When it came to more complex investments, like derivatives, Compton claimed there were no current qualifications that prepared planners to advise on such schemes and said higher standards were a necessity.
"What is needed is for financial planners to be degree qualified, not qualified by what is nothing more than a "cereal box" qualification," he concluded.
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