On 20 December 2005, the Corporations Amendment Regulations 2005 (No. 5) (the Regulations) came into effect. As previously reported, the amendments deal with refinements in a range of areas, including the following:
- Financial services guides (FSGs).
- Statements of advice.
- Short form product disclosure statements (PDSs).
- General advice (including when certain general advice will be excluded from the definition of financial product advice).
Experts’ Reports And FSGs
In this article, we will be specifically looking at the changes to the requirement for experts to provide an FSG and the fact the new regulations provide a welcome surprise.
A brief recap—some experts who provided a report in a PDS needed to hold an Australian financial services (AFS) licence to do this. Whilst perhaps not very common these days, an investigating accountant signing off on forecasts is an example where this situation arose. As a consequence of needing an AFS licence, those experts affected needed
