Speaking to ifa, TPB chair Ian Taylor said that despite concerns aired by the financial planning industry during consultation on the Tax Agent Services Act (TASA) regime, the TPB has not established a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with FOS or the Credit Ombudsman Service.
“We’re not envisaging that we need an MOU with FOS or COSL. There will be cooperation between the organisations, and as part of the current processes where they refer something to ASIC it might then be referred on to us as well,” said Mr Taylor.
While the TPB does not have the power to order clients be compensated (like FOS and COSL), it can apply certain sanctions which can be appealed in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
“These include a decision to place an order on somebody to do something – and that could be an education course – or we could suspend somebody, or we could terminate them,” said Mr Taylor.
While there is no explicit agreement with FOS, Mr Taylor said his organisation is in the process of drawing up a MOU with ASIC.
“The [tax (financial) adviser regime] is a regime where entities are already registered with ASIC – and every AFSL and authorised representative is [currently] registered with ASIC,” said Mr Taylor.
“The main basis of the MOU with ASIC is to deal with the sharing of information and working cooperatively with the two organisations,” he said.
Under the agreement, ASIC will provide the TPB with “all of the information it has about AFSLs and authorised representatives” in order to make it easier for advisers to register and to “reduce red tape”, said Mr Taylor.
Financial planners who provide tax advice can notify the TPB and become registered as tax (financial) advisers from July 1.
Update
According to my Licencee, based on current developments, the answer to my question below is YES
Its already getting out of hand…vested interests and a failure of the FPA and others to obtain commons sense in this area. An adviser tells a client about imputation credits – that is factual – but not under teh new regime. Give me a break, of course its not tax advice. Serious minds should be confronting this as the current lot representing advisers clearly are not up to the job…or perhaps they just dont care as long as they are seen to be doing something.
If a risk only adviser tells a client he may claim a tax deduction for his income protection premiums and super risk premiums ( reading directly from the PDS )does that constitute TAX ADVICE
Well aren’t we all shocked that despite the issue being raised in advance it was totally ignored. All the bureaucracy cares about is information sharing and no consideration of what happens with all that duplication of shared information, and shared oversight, and shared interactions, and worst of all, shared legal processes.
The crooks don’t care and the innocent have one more bureaucracy to prove their innocence to. In five years time we will have yet another enquiry as to what went wrong and why imposing extra rules did not stop the crooks from ignoring them.