Improving engagement with associations a priority: ASIC

Appearing before the House standing committee on economics last week, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said it has prioritised working with industry organisations in order to take their specialist expertise on board.

ASIC chair Joe Longo said the regulator has put a focus on “having a systemic impact and solving problems”.

“We’ve really upped our engagement with industry and industry organisations across the economy,” Longo told the committee.

Deputy chair Sarah Court added that it is an area that ASIC is “making a big effort to uplift and improve”.

“An area have been working on, and I think making some progress on is … really improving the way we interact with professional associations,” Court said.

“We do receive assistance and information from a range of professionals. And in the past, again, there has been some criticism that we have not fully engaged and been fully receptive to their specialist expertise.”

Responding to questions from Liberal MP Bert van Manen, Court also acknowledged that the regulator’s engagement with reporters of misconduct also requires improvement.

“The first thing I should acknowledge is we have discussed this issue and been aware of concerns from reporters of misconduct to ASIC of a perception that we’re not engaging with them or giving them sufficient information in response to their reports,” she said.

“It’s something we take seriously, and we have been doing a lot of internal thinking and work into how we address that.”

However, she noted that given the high level of misconduct reports, there are “a few challenges”.

“We receive in the order of 10,000 reports of misconduct from a range of sources every year, and we triage those, we have a very experienced triage area that triages them and tries to make quick assessments as to which of those reports need immediate and urgent action,” Court said.

She added: “We are simply not resourced to have continuing engagement with people that refers matters to us at a high level.”

According to the deputy chair, ASIC is also in “dire need of a technology investment”, which would also help with engaging with reporters of misconduct.

“Improving the way that we interact with and respond to reporters of misconduct is an area that we have regularly received feedback in relation to, that we recognise we have to continue to lift and improve the way that we do that. Some of that is also dependent on being able to uplift those systems to enable us to engage more efficiently, but it’s certainly something that we are really working on very hard that,” Court said.

She added that the broader industry has also called for greater transparency around the nature of the complaints, how ASIC engages, as well as the reasoning for which complaints are actioned.

“We are again doing some work internally to really think about how we might improve our transparency in relation to those reports,” Court said.

“So, they are some of the things that we have formed a view that we need to work on.”