Abood demands timeframes from Jones regarding multiple matters in advice

Addressing the possibility that the government may opt for additional expert analysis of the final report of the Quality of Advice Review (QAR), the chief executive officer of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), Sarah Abood, told ifa that the industry would like to hear directly from the Minister on how he plans to proceed.

This week, the QAR lead, Michelle Levy, confirmed that Financial Services Minister, Stephen Jones, relayed to her last Thursday that he intended to stress test how the report would be “operationalised”.

That is, the Minister could be planning to launch an expert analysis of Ms Levy’s report before he takes any of the 22 recommendations to parliament.

Speaking on a recent ifa podcast, Ms Abood said that while Ms Levy clearly holds a “very detailed understanding of the law”, the FPA believes stress testing could help determine how recommendations are applied. 

“What I would like to see done and I think has some potential is let’s pick up a whole range of issues, perhaps issues of misconduct that have happened, perhaps areas where participants are uncertain about how the laws would apply, and run those case studies through it and kind of stress test it to say, well, this particular piece of poor behaviour, would it still be against the law?

“And the other stress test I think we could do is ensuring that it’s practically able to be applied. So, if I’m running an advice firm and the law changed in this way, how would I actually deal with that? What systems and processes would I implement? Would that be reasonable?”

But Ms Abood would like the Minister to clarify his next steps, and flagged concerns about potential delays.

“There have been reviews that have happened in the past that ended up not being acted on or only a small proportion of the recommendations were acted on. That’s the fear that a lot of members have expressed to me that they don’t want to see it gathering dust on a top shelf, that we would like to see a process around a review if there’s an expert review,” Ms Abood said.

“If there’s consultation, okay, but we’d like to see the timeframes on that”.

She, however, added that the FPA is eager to see progress on several matters within the advice profession.

“The other big one, of course, is professional standards. There are many people hanging on, okay, so what are we going to do? We heard this experience pathway was coming, we really want to know what’s happening so we can make decisions in our businesses and for our own futures,” Ms Abood said.

“So there’s a bit of a log jam, I think, that’s starting to collect around change that we’re really keen to see. We’ve got to get the balance between giving due consideration to what that change is and what its impact is, but also not leaving people in limbo for ages, wondering what on earth their future is going to be,” she continued.

“People need to make decisions in these areas and these decisions are important. So we’re keen to see timeframes, we’re keen to see structure so that people know what the outcomes are going to be for them, what their opportunity is to have input into them, and when they’re going to know the answer.”

To hear more from Ms Abood tune into our podcast here.