IQ Group has announced a partnership with global tax and audit software specialist CCH to tackle increased reporting requirements that superannuation funds will face from the middle of this year.
An Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) consultation from September highlighted the "vastly increased" data collection requirements that public, retail and corporate superannuation funds will face from 1 July this year, IQ Group chief executive Graham Sammells told InvestorWeekly.
"Client estimates forecast the involvement from two to five team members when this particular set of APRA requirements become effective for funds from July 2013," Mr Sammells said.
APRA requires more than 4,000 data elements to be reported across areas that include financials, investment holdings, investment performance, fees, insurance, defined benefit matters, services and membership profile.
'Bad' data, or data that is inaccurate, incomplete, outdated or inconsistent, can be identified through reconciliations and testing for data quality, Mr Sammells said.
It is important a fund doesn't remit bad data to APRA, and because APRA reporting requirements are broad and many elements overlap with reporting to other regulators, it is important to have a central or single "source of truth", he added.
As a result, IQ Group has partnered with CCH - a Wolters Kluwer business that specialises in tax, accounting and audit information and software - to implement the CCH-develope solution to help super funds and administrators meet reporting requirements.
The two groups have partnered to implement a reporting tool which they say will help manage risk by providing auditability, traceability, change-control, approvals and a single "source of truth".
The tool is not unlike one that has been used for similar taxation and compliance reporting for 10 years. It also helps aggregate and disaggregate the source data into the information required by APRA, IQ Group stated.
Overall, the solution will help clients reduce the cost of meeting compliance requirements, reduce the risk of non-compliance and improve the quality of data at super funds generally, according to IQ Group.
"APRA's new reporting requirements will become the master data source for each fund and the industry as a whole," CCH Corporate Reporting Solutions' managing director, Peter Boyle, said.
"Every product disclosure statement advertisement and report will have to utilise data from the APRA reports. That means the reports have to be 100 per cent accurate, 100 per cent of the time. Automation is the only way to achieve that level reliably and at a reasonable cost."
Mr Sammells said initial setup and training to use the reporting tool is easy, with no additional IT involvement. However, the length of time to set it up depends on the number of data sources, and the complexity and quality of the data provided.
