Speaking at the SMSF Association’s national conference, ASIC deputy chair Peter Kell said one of the two areas of focus ASIC has over the next few months is the ongoing work it is doing to lift the standards of advice and “to focus on areas where [it] believes there may be risks of poor advice”.
“As part of that, we’ll have a major project this year on advice given around SMSFs. We’ll be looking in particular at advice, if it’s been given recently, about establishing an SMSF or advice that’s currently at play,” Mr Kell said.
“As part of that, we’ll be doing an advice shadow shop of the sector to get a real-time, on the ground picture of the sort of advice that’s being offered to people out there when it comes to setting up an SMSF.”
Mr Kell said the project will give ASIC a sense of what is working well and what isn’t, adding that its results will later be communicated to the industry.
“We’re getting some useful data from our colleagues at the ATO that will help us target that effectively, so that [project] is going to be one of the main areas of work for us in the advice space in 2017,” he said.
“We’ve done these sorts of exercises [in] the past few years, around advice at the point of retirement, and it does help us get a picture of what’s actually being said, because it’s sometimes difficult to get that complete picture from just the files themselves.”
Mr Kell said ASIC also has a “very heavy focus at the moment on working its way through the limited license applications”.
Is it just me … or is ‘shadow shopping’ misleading and ‘deceptive conduct’ …. Ah! the power of the gun!
I just hope that they focus their efforts in the right areas. I’ve seen lots of SMSFs which should not have been set up, with people getting ripped off by shonky ‘investment’ schemes who refer to planners who want to make a quick buck. It isn’t in the best interest of the client, and they’re going to be years worse off because of how much money they wasted on a failed attempt at boosting their retirement funds. I don’t think this is a bad idea, as it’ll hopefully weed out those who are clearly doing the wrong thing, but ASIC should keep in mind that an adviser shouldn’t be severely penalised if it’s merely questionable as to whether or not a SMSF was the best option – it should be a matter of truly weeding out the clearly unsuitable advice to set up a SMSF.
Hope they also shadow shop the accounting sector to determine if the firm is appropriately liecensed
Here we go again. The problems with the SMSF story has seen accountants, property marketing firms going head over heals getting at the retirement funds to do people over with fees and back door commissions. Meanwhile the government thanks to Morrison/Bowen believe in doing superannuation members over by placing restrictions on their retirement with the sole purpose of attacking retirement funds for short term revenue gains, despite and ageing population and under funded retirement outcomes. So ASIC seeking to do this is once again, to little to late as usual for this noddy cop on the beat. As for their activity and that of government of both persuasions, these fools create problems to then say to all and sundry that they will save us all from the evils they created. Damn useless fools the lot of them.
Imagine if an SMSF was to be created, financial advice with the SOA strategy has to be there also, like it is now. Now imagine if this was to be the case from the outset and government encouraged long term planning for ones retirement allowing people to add to their savings, monitored by an IFA accredited as need be in the area of SMSF advice with the vision of having more SELF funded retirees, saving the taxpayer a bucket of money as they now do not need to fund age pensions that are growing at an alarming rate. But hey, that needs common sense with people of vision. No luck on that one with the current rabble we have as politicians and their minion short sighted regulators. As I said, damn fools with to little to late…..investors have lost again due to the incompetent that is the current cop on the beat ASIC.