SOA hold-ups still plaguing licensed accountants

Merit Wealth accountants services director David Moss said some of the dealer groups providing licensing to accountants don’t have a thorough understanding of the services provided by accountants and don’t have the systems in place to deal with the surge in SOA document requests from SMSF accountants at certain points in the year.

“Our group has processed 1,200 SOAs over the past 12 months and 700 to 800 of those were during the months of May and June only. So there was suddenly a massive surge of accountants seeking to get their SOAs out. Unless you’ve got the systems to process them quickly and efficiently, you’re going to have a big problem,” Mr Moss explained.

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“If you’ve gone from zero to 700 SOAs from accountants in a matter of months you’ve either got the processes to deal with that or not and from what I’ve heard most licensing providers don’t. If you’re reviewing all SOAs and you have 700 come in and you don’t have a dedicated team or have prepared for that then you’re going to have a large back-log.”

The other issue, Mr Moss, is that the process of producing an SOA is often not tailored towards the needs of accounting firms.

“Accountants look at the process and they don’t understand it, because the process was created for financial planners and it’s worded in the way in which financial planners need it,” he said.

Other dealer groups simply leave accountants to figure out the SOA process on their own, he said, and while this may alleviate issues with delayed documents, it can be more problematic given that many accountants don’t have a thorough understanding of how to produce and SOA correctly.

“As a result you’ve got statements of advice being prepared by people that have never done one before, with no supervision and no oversight, which creates a problem in itself,” he said.

“So this is a massive issue for accountants under a licence. They’re saying well I thought I did the right thing by getting licensed, but I can’t ever get these documents prepared, or I don’t know how to prepare these documents.”