Advisers hoped the Stronger Super report delivered a single view that could steer the industry in a unified direction, industry participants have said.
“What we’d like to see is a uniform report, not a dissenting view,” Synchron director John Prossor said.
Prossor said he was concerned over reports of dissension on more than one matter addressed in the report.
“A dissenting view doesn’t help anyone. Beyond that we’ll work with whatever comes out,” he said.
Stronger Super Peak Consultative Group chairman Paul Costello and his team handed the report to the office of Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten about a week ago, a spokesman for Shorten said.
“We will comment on the report in due course,” the spokesman said.
A Dixon Advisory Services executive said the group hoped barriers to entry for investors in self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF) were not raised.
Dixon financial advisory executive director Nerida Cole said she was referring to setting up an SMSF and rolling an exiting superannuation fund into an SMSF.
“At the moment, we feel that in practice there are pretty strict systems in place in terms of the rollover procedure and in terms of protecting the integrity of that procedure,” Cole said.
The report by Costello and his 14-member working group contains their recommended reforms to Australia’s $1.36 billion superannuation industry.
Sources have said the group was at loggerheads over the pricing mechanism of MySuper, but its deepest discord was over automatic super consolidation.
“Do we mind whether all funds are consolidated or only those under $1000 are consolidated? Not really,” Prossor said.
“Some of our advisers and their clients have to do a fair bit of work to consolidate these things, so if it can happen automatically, it’s better for everyone – although the question then becomes ‘consolidated into where?’
“If it was something like award modernisation, which created funds for just about every award and they were all industry funds, we’d have an issue with that.”
Another concern some sources have raised is the Australian Taxation Office’s (ATO) ability to build what would effectively be a national database to hold superannuation information.
However, the ATO said it preferred a more restricted role.
“We act as a middle man between members of the public and their fund,” an ATO spokesman said.
“The ATO can provide a [superannuation] portability form and we can act as an identifier. Beyond that, we let individuals manage their relationships with their fund managers.”
Cole said auto-consolidation was a peripheral issue for most SMSF trustees since they tended to be more engaged with their super.
“We are comfortable with the concept of the ATO being given more flexibility with their powers in terms of the graduated penalty mechanism,” he said, adding the current system was more of an all-or-nothing proposition.
“We think a graduated system would help trustees understand a bit better when they’re in error.”
