The new single disciplinary body for the financial planning industry should encompass the role of the Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA) and elements of the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC).
Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) general manager, policy and professionalism, Phil Anderson said that in the interests of reducing complexity and cost for financial advisers, he believed that there should be a single body responsible for adviser registration, code monitoring, policy and discipline.
He acknowledged that for such a single body to work, he anticipated that it would have to traverse roles currently covered by ASIC, the TPB and FASEA.
The single disciplinary body was a recommendation of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry and saw the Government abandon the creation of code monitoring bodies to oversee the FASEA code of conduct.
Both the AFA and the Financial Planning Association (FPA) together with the SMSF Association were part of a consortium which had been in advanced planning to establish a code-monitoring body.
The Treasury has already conducted preliminary consultations with industry representatives around the shape of the single disciplinary body ahead of the original December 2020 deadline for the establishment of such a body, however that time-line now has now been extended to July 2021 because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anderson said that while it was comparatively early days in the debate, he believed that the best outcome for financial advisers would be a single body rather than simply building on the multitude of regulatory structures currently impacting on the advice sector.
Those structures included ASIC, the TPB and FASEA as well as the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA).
