Incoming government challenged to address ‘ridiculously useless’ compliance issues

Peter Johnston, executive director of the Association of Independently Owned Financial Professional (AIOFP), has outlined a number of short-term issues that the incoming government must address, including the “compliance regime”.

On a upcoming episode of the ifa Show podcast, Mr Johnston said the compliance situation needs to be rationalised, following a wave of reforms over the last few years, particularly in the last 12 months.

“Minimum 50 per cent needs to be wiped out,” Mr Johnston said.

“It could be done in a day. It doesn’t have to go on for months and months and months with bureaucrats. It should be people from the industry – people from AFCA representing consumers and people from ASIC. They could sit in a room in an afternoon and point out all the stuff which is just ridiculously useless and just get rid of it.”

Mr Johnston said the AIOFP will also be urging the government and shadow financial services minister Stephen Jones to fix the “cliff” facing thousands of advisers who are yet to pass the financial adviser exam.

“These people, if they don’t pass by 1 September, they’re actually kicked out of the industry, which would be a tragedy,” he said.

Mr Johnston said that the AIOFP has raised this concern with Mr Jones who agreed that the issue needed to be addressed.

It comes after Mr Johnston slammed the outgoing Morrison government following the election loss this month for its "unfairly harsh" treatment of advisers.

"We hope future governments will think twice before trying to politically victimise our community again," he said.

Speaking on a recent webinar hosted by Stockbrokers and Investment Advisers Association (SIAA), Mr Jones doubled down on his earlier commitment to fix the “hot mess” that is the advice industry by introducing an ‘experience pathway’.

“We want to put in place a sensible, efficient recognition of prior learning arrangement so that if you’ve been doing the job for ten years, you can continue to be a licensed adviser provided you haven’t got any black marks,” Mr Jones said.

He assured that if appointed, Labor “should be able to” enact the experience pathway “pretty quickly”.

Listen to the full podcast with Mr Johnston here.

READ MORE: Advice industry can’t unite until ‘ridiculous’ number of associations is cut down

Neil Griffiths

Neil is the Deputy Editor of the wealth titles, including ifa and InvestorDaily.

Neil is also the host of the ifa show podcast.