AFCA review open

Ian Rogers

Federal Treasury has announced a review of the Australian Financial Complaints Authority and provided the community with a rather short consultation document to kick off the consultation process.

The AFCA is the body that consumers can complain to when they have exhausted the avenues of appeal within financial institutions themselves.

This review has been called because the law establishing the complaints body requires the government to establish a review 18 months after the organisation was formed.

Respondents to this call for comments to the review team within Federal Treasury have until March 2021 to provide the government with thoughts about the running of the system.

There are some points the Treasury wants comment on that are contained in a rather slim five-page terms of reference document for the consultation processes.

Key questions being put by Treasury to the community include whether AFCA is meeting its objectives of resolving complaints in a fair, efficient, timely and independent manner.

It also asks respondents to explore the notion of whether the funding model currently used for the complaints resolution body is appropriate and whether this is able to be done better.

Treasury is also picking the brains of stakeholders on the work done by the independent assessor within AFCA. The independent assessor is able to look at complaints related to how AFCA got to resolving complaints against institutions.

That assessor function relates solely to APRA’s sausage machine and whether its process was reasonable.

Treasury wants stakeholders to consider whether the independent assessor’s role needs to morph in order to be able to undertake other functions such as reviewing the actual substance of decisions.