The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) will be tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Federal Government's changes to the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) to ensure they are effective and do not generate any unintended consequences.
The Assistant Treasurer, Senator Arthur Sinodinos, has outlined ASIC's role in the process while seeking to give assurances that the Government is not seeking to water down the broad intent of the FOFA legislation.
Rather, he said on national television that his underlying objective was to create a level playing field between the various elements of the planning industry from bank-aligned planners and those employed by industry funds right through to IFAs.
However he sent a clear message to planners that they should seek to abide by the spirit and intent of the original legislation.
"What I'm hoping to do is make some, I hope, judicious judgments around what helps to, and my guiding light here is a level playing field and reducing the costs of complying with the legislation and potentially removing unintended consequences," he said.
"But once I put the legislation — and it will start to happen from next week — into the House, into the Parliament, I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on it and so will ASIC," Sinodinos said.
"Because … the instructions going to ASIC are going to be that when in monitoring what we are doing, make sure that we are monitoring behaviour in the spirit of the original legislation, because we supported the original legislation subject to the changes that I now talk about," he said.
