The Financial Advice Association Australia (FAAA) has expressed its disappointment over the progress of the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes (DBFO) package and the results that have manifested from it to date.
“I think it’s fair to say the red tape savings from Tranche 1 of the legislation have not transpired. We’re still dealing with ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) on issues like what happens to fee consents where the account number is absent because we were establishing a new product,” FAAA chief executive Sarah Abood revealed to attendees of a webinar hosted yesterday.
“It’s incredibly frustrating because these laws were intended to reduce red tape and so far at least, due to what are really quite minor flaws in the legislation that to us would be relatively simple to fix, are actually impacting on practices [in a negative way].”
Further, Abood pointed out the above example is not the only type of scenario with which the industry body and its members are disappointed.
“The other element of the red tape reductions that was disappointing was the tranche of legislation that was released by the previous [financial services] minister [Stephen Jones] just before the election where what we saw on reducing the red tape, the compliance burden around the statement of advice, just hasn’t transpired,” she said.
According to Abood, the FAAA has performed analysis to determine exactly the effectiveness of the DBFO measures and the results again did not reflect the outcomes the government had promised in its response to the final report emanating from the Quality of Advice Review.
“Looking at the changes in the legislation, we have done the comparison, a line-by-line comparison with what’s in the legislation currently compared to what’s proposed to change, and we don’t see much there,” she said.
“We certainly don’t see major red tape savings, so that’s been a problem.”
