An executive at one of Australia’s largest superannuation platforms could not tell ASIC what the advice fee cap was on their own product.

They didn’t just not know the number, they didn’t even know whether a cap existed at all, in any coherent form. This was not a junior compliance officer lost in the wilds of a administrative jungle. Under the Financial Accountability Regime, this is the person who is supposed to be held personally, individually accountable for knowing precisely these things.

FAR commenced for superannuation trustees, their directors and their senior executives in March last year.

It replaced the Banking Executive Accountability Regime, extending to super funds what the Hayne royal commission recommended be extended to every APRA-regulated entity: named individuals, registered with the regulator, each holding a specific, non-overlapping slice of responsibility, each personally required to act with honesty, integrity and due care.

If you fail that standard the regulator can disqualify you from being an accountable person ever again.

Forty per cent of an accountable person’s variable pay is deferred for four years and can be clawed back by their employer if it later turns out they should not have earned it.  In theory, at least, these are not frivolous issues. FAR makes the expectations of named individuals about as clear as can be. But in practice it is yet to bare its teeth.

ASIC’s Report 833, published last month, was the first real examination of whether any of that machinery actually operates in superannuation. It reviewed six platform trustees holding $305 billion in member benefits, between June 2024 and October 2025, a period about seven months into the regime for super funds. 

The result was disturbing, with half the trustees saying they did no advice document checks at all in at least one month of the review. One ran just 21 checks, found problems in 75 per cent of them, and kept going regardless.

One trustee proposed lifting its advice fee cap to $30,000, well above the $20,000 ceiling ASIC had already flagged in an earlier review as being as generous.

In its executive summary, rather than in its press release, ASIC noted specifically that in feedback meetings with trustees it found a small number of accountable senior executives did not know what advice fee caps and other controls were in place on their own platforms.

ASIC says senior executive teams need reporting good enough “to satisfy themselves that they are complying with their Financial Accountability Regime obligations”.

Can’t say they weren’t warned

It’s not as though the FAR obligation arrived without warning. APRA wrote to platform trustees in October 2025, telling them that they could not outsource accountability under the regime.

So it’s disingenuous to say that some wriggle room should be extended to trustees and directors while FAR beds down. The regulator named the exact nature of the failures, mid-review-period, and months after that some trustees’ own executives still didn’t know their own controls.

ASIC Commissioner Simone Constant made the point when REP 833 was published that despite years of warnings, including the Hayne royal commission’s exposure of fees for no service and the collapses of the Shield and First Guardian master funds, some trustees still hadn’t put basic protections in place, such as checking an advice licensee’s business model before onboarding it. 

“This is a clear breach of trust,” Constant said.

The Shield and First Guardian collapses cost more than 11,000 Australians roughly $1 billion in retirement savings. One trustee had evidence of suspicious rollovers, including forged signatures of a deceased adviser, and sat on it for thirteen months before doing.

So far, every enforcement action so far arising from Shield and First Guardian in relation to an APRA-regulated entity has named a company, not a person: Equity Trustees, Diversa Trustees, Macquarie Investment Management and Netwealth.

Two of those four entities have found a way to look like they’ve made amends, at a combined cost to their shareholders of more than $400 million, with no accountable individuals named.

None of those four cases will produce individual FAR liability, because FAR isn’t retrospective and the regime didn’t yet exist for the conduct in question. Action under the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act and the Corporations Act was the only route open to ASIC, and it used it.

Accountable executives don’t know

But REP 833 is important because its findings about accountable executives not knowing their own controls were made after FAR began to apply to super trustees. It’s the first evidence ASIC has that accountable individuals, operating under the regime, are failing in their obligations.

ASIC examined platforms – businesses that are sophisticated, well-resourced and presumably well-populated with lawyers – because that’s where Shield and First Guardian happened, and it’s the segment under the most scrutiny and with the most incentive to clean itself up.  But this isn’t exclusively a platforms issue. FAR applies to every director and senior executive of every APRA-regulated superannuation trustee, not only the six that ASIC sampled for REP 833.

FAR’s penalties include disqualification, responsibility reallocation directions and remuneration clawback, which all sit with ASIC and APRA, who jointly administer and jointly enforce the regime. The real test is what happens next. REP 833 is the first documentation by a regulator of failures that occurred, and for states of knowledge that existed, while the FAR regime was in effect for superannuation.

Whether ASIC or APRA use FAR’s disqualification power against a named person, or whether the response simply leads to another report, letter, press release or corporate settlement, will tell us more about how the regime is going to work from here than eighteen months of theory and legal opinions have so far. Every super trustee and director is waiting for the answer.