The Turnbull government handed all Australians an early but largely unrecognised Christmas present this week when it decided to shelve a deeply unpopular proposal to privatise the ASIC Registry, writes Nathan Lynch*.The plan to privatise the ASIC registry was a hangover from the ill-fated Abbot-Hockey "budget repair" campaign. The government was to sell off a critical piece of financial infrastructure in return for a temporary sugar hit to the Budget.While in need of urgent repairs and maintenance, the Registry is hugely profitable to the government and charges some of the highest fees in the world for company searches. The deal as envisaged would have seen a private operator take over the role of operating and overhauling the ageing infrastructure that underpins the regulator's Registry business. The revenue from Registry fees (including company search fees) are structured as Commonwealth taxes, leaving governments of both persuasions to milk this asset for years, without spending on the infrastructure.When the government says things like taxpayers have been "hit to fund this regulator", they're being very frugal with facts. Fifteen years ago, when the current fee model was introduced, company registry fees were a pretty good proxy for the regulator's workload.Fast forward to 2016, however, and ASIC's role has expanded greatly to include functions such as consumer credit, market supervision and the national business names register. Likewise, fee revenue has increased exponentially over the past decade and a half. In the 2015 financial year, for example, ASIC raised A$824 million for the Commonwealth in revenue but cost just A$311 million to run.In addition to the existing A$824 million annual income stream, in April the government announced a new "user pays" model to cover the cost of ASIC's regulatory workload. This is expected to raise around A$330 million each year from mid-2017 onwards. Yet there was no mention of reducing company fees by an equivalent amount. The net result is that ASIC will be bringing in more than A$800 million to the Commonwealth each year, above the cost of running the entire agency.The government is, in effect, hoping to "double dip" by introducing a user-pays funding model for ASIC while arguing that Registry fees have nothing to do with the funding of the agency (they are, after all, Commonwealth taxes ...).Nevertheless, Mathias Cormann, minister for finance, said the privatisation had been shelved as it would "not deliver a net financial benefit for the Commonwealth." Whatever the political motives, the government should be applauded for cutting its losses on the privatisation model and embracing good public policy.The next step should be to review the fees and charges for conducting company searches in Australia. These fees add significantly to the cost of conducting beneficial ownership checks for anti-money laundering, bribery and corruption, tax and counter-fraud compliance. This is especially challenging for smaller reporting entities under the AML/CTF regime, which have very tight budgets for conducting customer due diligence work.According to ASIC's most recent annual report, company search fees netted the government A$58 million. This included, for example, charging