Should ASIC executives be subject to the BEAR?
Senior executives within the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) will face the same strictures as bank executives under the Bank Executive Accountability Regime (BEAR).
ASIC chairman, James Shipton has told the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry that not only does his organisation want the BEAR applied across the entire financial services industry, he is minded to apply it to his own executives within ASIC.
He said he was minded to do so because of what he described as the “hypocritical risks of a regulator”.
“If we expect something of the regulated community, we must be holding that – that standard to ourselves,” he said. “And I have asked our team, well before I came here today, to undertake what is a review across our organisation of making sure that we are holding ourselves to the highest standard of account using as a benchmark the standards we expect of others.”
Shipton said he would be talking to his ASIC commissioners about their acceptance and implementation of such a model.
Under questioning from counsel assisting the Commission, Rowena Orr QC, Shipton acknowledged that, unlike the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), ASIC’s management was made up entirely of executive members rather than executive and non-executive members.
He said he believed day-to-day executive operational responsibility should be moved to another class or strata of managers.
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