RODNEY Gibson is a Queensland-based financial planner and practising tax agent, and he’s on the hunt. Gibson is out to kill a few sacred cows at this month’s Queensland state Financial Planning Association (FPA) conference.
According to Gibson, the industry has been progressively pushed into doing business with the constant threat of legal action against it, criticism from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and FPA intervention often looming overhead. This, he says, has taken over from the real job of the financial planner — providing a service to people needing professional help.
“Some years ago, I placed an investment with a fund manager. At the time, I had no tax file number for the client, so I sent it in a few days later by fax. I then got a phone call saying the fund manager couldn’t accept the client’s tax file number from the adviser. They said it was part of the tax law but when I asked what section, they couldn’t tell me. So I went off and found the section in the tax law that says an adviser can give a client’s tax file number to a fund manager, photocopied that and sent it to the general manager,” Gibson says.
“Two years later the same thing happened, another fund manager said they couldn’t take a tax file number from an adviser, but this time they said it was their policy.”
Gibson says it is this kind of activity, and people hiding behind laws, which causes inconvenience, frustration and difficulty for advisers.
“People in government and regulatory agencies are taking their own view of the way business should be conducted,” he says.
Gibson’s presentation will attack licensing, research, privacy, risk profiling and fee disclosure.
“Risk profiling is a con job, a commercial enterprise that has no substance in reality. How can you evaluate the risk-taking capacity of someone who doesn’t really know what’s going on,” he says.
Gibson will deliver his presentation alongside the FPA’s legal counsel, June Smith, for the audience to hear both sides of the ‘sacred cow’ debate.
