Opposition assistant treasury spokesman Mathias Cormann has questioned whether intra-fund advice is consistent with the objective of the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms.
Cormann, who is a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee (PJC) on Corporations and Financial Services, questioned why under intra-fund advice super fund members had to pay for this service, even though they might not access it.
"I thought FOFA was about increasing transparency and making sure that people receive the advice they pay for," Cormann said during yesterday's PJC hearing on the FOFA reforms.
"A lot of people will pay for advice they won't access.
"One hundred per cent of members will pay for advice that will be accessed by 3-10 per cent of members. How is that consistent with FOFA?"
The question was put to Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia chief executive Pauline Vamos.
Vamos argued that where a compulsory system required people to contribute money to a fund, they were entitled to ask questions about their interest in the fund.
"Where you have a compulsory system ... there is the moral and social obligation to ensure that when they want advice about their interest in that fund they can access it," she said.
She also argued that it was a relative small cost of the overall operational costs of a fund due to the scale of the funds and the nature of the advice.
"When you look at the total operating cost of the fund, 40 per cent of the operating amounts are administration, 17 per cent of that 40 per cent goes to financial planning and 23 per cent goes to providing call centres. The majority of call centres provide general advice," she said.
"You will have with any superannuation fund service, whether it is administration, the call centre, practical advice or access to the website, you will always have services provided that everybody pays for that not everybody takes up."
After a question from PJC chairman Bernie Ripoll, Industry Super Network chief executive David Whiteley also pointed out that intra-fund advice was available to both retail and industry funds, thereby not favouring any industry.
"It is available to all funds, not just industry funds," he said.
Whiteley said a number of retail funds were already providing services that could be labelled intra-fund, or simple, advice, including Mercer and ANZ.
