Masses of accountants have not signed up for financial planning authorisations or licences because the advice they provide is different, the managing director of Certainty Advice Group, Jim Stackpool, has claimed.
He said the long held territorial dispute’ between accountants and financial planners will be a thing of the past and those who predicted a coming together of the two professions once the accountant exemption ended on 30 June were mistaken.
“The industry experts got it wrong,” Stackpool said, adding “The reason they got it wrong? It’s simple. The advice is different.”
“Across all media outlets, experts were expecting thousands more than the few hundred accounting firms that applied for their own financial services license in advance of the June 30 exemption cut-off date,” Stackpool said pointing to the 350 accounting firms, out of 8500, which had applied for a limited licence.
Scott Farmer, the principle of Bravium, a Canberra-based Certainty Advice firm said the idea of a dispute between the two professions has been overstated and accountants are more focused on their work than that of financial planners.
“We just don’t see disputes in our world because we don’t have any of the industry’s incentive barriers affecting our advice.”
“Accountants aren’t thinking about us and our role as financial advisers. They will never do anything to endanger their trusted role, so logically they will focus on their accounting expertise. Any professional dispute has been overstated for years,” Farmer said.
His comments were echoed by Travis Martin of TWD, a Certainty Advice firm in West Perth who said any disputes were more likely to be related to issues of conflicted advice models within vertically integrated operations.
“We just don’t see disputes in our world because we don’t have any of the industry’s incentive barriers affecting our advice. Like the medical profession we seek to collaborate and find solutions that work for the client, the accountant and our firm,” Travis said.
I think that the statistics might reflect that either accountants are not providing advice (therefore they are admin service) or they are providing the advice in an unlicensed regime. How can you realistically be giving your client “tax advice” and not dealing with aspects such as superannuation.
Time for ASIC to review SMSFs set up after 30/06/2016…
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