The Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) latest consultation paper could result in greater training requirements for advisers than is currently the case.
The TPB released a paper on Continuing Professional Education (CPE) requirements last week and proposed to increase the number of hours from 20 to 40 hours per year to align with requirements under the Financial Adviser Standard and Ethics Authority (FASEA).
Rob Lavery, technical and policy manager at online advice portal knowIT, said: “The TPB’s proposed position that a financial adviser is ‘likely’ to meet the TPB’s CPE requirements if they meet FASEA’s CPD [continuing professional development] requirements, contains a caveat: any FASEA CPD activities must be able to be demonstrably linked to the adviser’s tax (financial) advice services to qualify as CPE under the TPB’s requirements.
“This only becomes really concerning when looked at in conjunction with another of the TPB’s proposed positions. The TPB has proposed to increase CPE requirements from an effective 20 hours per year, to 40 hours per year to align with the requirements of FASEA.
“If the TPB insists that all FASEA CPD needs to be related to providing tax (financial) adviser services in order to meet CPE requirements, advisers are going to be left well short of their 40 hour obligation when relying on FASEA CPD alone.”
He said the ‘only outcome’ he could see that would streamline advisers’ ongoing education requirements was complete alignment with FASEA requirements, without the caveat that all training relating to providing tax (financial) advice.
If the caveat was included then it would lead to advisers’ needing to do far more than 40 hours of annual training to meet both the TPB and FASEA requirements.
