A joint paper written by consultancy firm Licensing for Accountants and law firm Holley Nethercote said the limited licence regime was introduced to provide accountants with a solution to become licensed without the need to operate under someone else’s licence with traditional advisory authorities or full AFSL.
Licensing for Accountants chief executive Kath Bowler said some practices are finding that the limited licence is not meeting their needs, however, and that they now want to operate under their own full AFSL.
“This is prohibitively expensive, because it requires the licensee to find a responsible manager with the necessary experience,” Ms Bowler explained.
“A licensee cannot also be an authorised representative of another licensee. Also, limited licensees obtained the limited licence so as to avoid needing a full licence or operating under someone else’s licence.”
Accountants have been left in a situation where if they do want to expand, then they have to operate under someone else, she explained.
This goes against the whole intention of the regime, she said, which was designed to create a way for consumers to receive advice, with accountants ideally placed to be able to advise clients who haven’t been otherwise advised.
“So rather than constantly putting up roadblocks stopping them, [we should be] looking at it a different way, looking at how can we make this work, how can we encourage more accountants to provide advice and how we can encourage closer working relationships between accountants and planners,” she said.
“There needs to be a mechanism that allows accountants to upgrade to a full AFSL without bringing in new responsible managers. Whilst existing limited licence responsible managers do not have specific product experience, ASIC should consider some sort of transitional acknowledgement, coupled with a licensed oversight component.”
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Basically you are asking for Accountants to be treated differently than all other Financial Advisers who have to go through the full requirements to obtain a full Australian Financial Services Licence. I am a qualified Chartered Accountant so I don’t see why everyone shouldn’t have to meet the same requirements. I am also one of the Responsible Managers for our dealer group and have been for 18 years so you do need to have someone who understands the intricacies of Financial Service legislation. There is no free lunch in this area.
Honestly what a beat up.
Accountants who bother to do the appropriate course can take complete control and have their own
AFSL for an up front cost of $10k and $30k pa ongoing providing they are prepared to commit the time.
Otherwise join a dealer group who will do the work for you and fill in the gaps.
Limited licensing was a half baked band aid to deal with dissent of unlicensed financial planners trading as accountants..
The roadblocks in most cases are self imposed by accountants who simply want to do what they have always done and avoid the compliance regime imposed on everyone else in the financial planning industry.
Our business is approx 50% accounting and 50% financial planning. We have had our own AFSL for 30 years and have been trading as accountants for 46 years. Ours is not the solution for everyone but work out what your long term somultion is to be and invest the required time and money, or retire.