An Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia convened discussion panel has expressed the view accountants might hold the key to more Australians receiving financial advice and as such the proposed new licensing regime has to be structured carefully.
"The reality is the accountant is the trusted adviser. Even if people seek advice elsewhere, they still ask for an accountant's opinion and not to be able to give that opinion is extremely difficult," William Buck director Anna Carrabs said.
"So giving accountants clearer guidelines and enabling them to provide that advice has to be an important matter the regulators need to deal with because otherwise you'll find a lot of people out there that just won't seek advice at all and I think that is way more dangerous."
According to Super IQ chief executive Andrew Bloore, accountants needed to embrace the new licensing regime that would be implemented to ensure and deliver a high standard of advice in the future.
"The accounting professional is the trusted adviser, but in terms of an industry what we don't want to do is end up with people who are giving advice who are not trained or skilled to do so," Bloore said.
"Do we need licensing to do that? Possibly. It's a benchmarking issue to make sure we're at a set level that says I'm a skilled person able to do this."
He said the accounting profession did not want to be in the situation where licensing was rejected and the quality advice process was compromised as a result.
"We don't want to end up as an industry that argued for no licensing and we end up with assets going everywhere and all sorts of risk problems. If this were to happen it will all implode on us," he said.
