{"id":33471,"date":"2016-06-07T16:20:04","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T05:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/?p=33471"},"modified":"2016-06-08T08:15:51","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T21:15:51","slug":"asic-fires-warning-shot-for-accountants-giving-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/2016\/06\/07\/asic-fires-warning-shot-for-accountants-giving-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"ASIC Fires Warning Shot for Accountants Giving Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has warned accountants providing financial advice on self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF) that they risk breaking the law if they are not appropriately licensed to do so by 1 July.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The regulator stated it would take regulatory action against accountants who did not hold a limited Australian financial services (AFS) licence or were not an authorised representative (AR) of a licence-holder or licensee to provide financial product advice on SMSFS.<\/p>\n<h6>\u201cProviding unlicensed financial services is a criminal offence\u201d<\/h6>\n<p>However, ASIC further stated that even where an accountant had applied for a licence but not yet been granted the licence they would also be unable to provide SMSF-related financial advice and must refrain from doing so until they were licenced or became an AR of a licensee.<\/p>\n<p>The comments by ASIC come at the end of a three-year transition period that started on 1 July 2013 and 11 months after ASIC stated that accountants who had not met the new licensing requirements by 1 March 2016 were unlikely to have their application assessed and approved by 30 June 2016.<\/p>\n<p>ASIC, Senior Executive Leader, Assessment &amp; Intelligence, Warren Day said accountants providing unlicensed advice after 30 June could face regulatory action stating \u201cProviding unlicensed financial services is a criminal offence\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>ASIC stated it was currently assessing more than 300 applications for a limited AFS licence and would only accept complete applications in the lead up to 30 June.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Adviser Loses Appeal to Overturn Ban<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In further ASIC news, the regulator\u2019s decision to ban a former Meritum adviser from providing financial services for five years has been upheld by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT).<\/p>\n<p>ASIC announced that it had banned Alfie Chong on 16 September 2015 with Chong applying for a review and stay of ASIC\u2019s decision two days later on 18 September 2015.<\/p>\n<p>On 12 November 2015, the AAT refused Chong&#8217;s stay application and on 26 May 2016 the AAT found that a five-year ban was appropriate in the circumstances stating Chong\u2019s conduct showed repeated compliance failures and that he repeatedly blamed Meritum for his own failure to comply with Corporations Law.<\/p>\n<p>ASIC\u2019s review, which led to Chong\u2019s banning found he had<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>provided inappropriate advice;<\/li>\n<li>failed to determine clients&#8217; relevant personal circumstances or failed to conduct reasonable investigations into the subject matter of his advice;<\/li>\n<li>engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct in relation to a client signature that was copied and pasted on to an authority to proceed form;<\/li>\n<li>provided personal advice without giving clients a statement of advice (SOA);<\/li>\n<li>failed to provide sufficient detail about the basis on which the advice was given; and<\/li>\n<li>arranged for clients to implement advice and transactions before providing clients with an SOA.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has warned accountants providing financial advice on self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF) that they risk breaking the law if they are not appropriately licensed to do so by 1 July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5622],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-compliance-regulation","category-superannuation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}