Nearly half of all funds managers have yet to finalise their policies and procedures for unit pricing discretions, despite the ASIC deadline for doing so looming on May 1, according to a Deloitte survey.

ASIC requires that managed investment scheme operators have publicly available policies to deal with these discretions – that is, decisions on specific unit pricing valuations or methodologies that are made to strike prices, but are not fully described in product offer documents or governing constitutions. According to Deloitte unit pricing specialist Andy Young, of the 90 respondents from 50 funds managers surveyed, 21 per cent deemed their existing policies as ‘sufficient’. “;They will need to be comfortable that they can justify this position to their managed investment scheme compliance plan auditors who are likely to be assessing compliance with the new requirements as part of their 30 June 2007 audits,”; Young said. The fact that the majority of the Deloitte poll respondents who had decided how they were going to make this information available were only going to do so ‘on request’ (being the bare minimum requirement), “;is likely to be a disappointing outcome for those who believe consumers should be more involved in and informed about their investments”;, Young added. He warned funds managers that super funds and life insurance respondents to the survey indicated they were adopting the ASIC unit pricing standards as ‘best practice’.