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A 20-month inquiry into the corporate watchdog was shelved yesterday. And it wasn’t pretty.
In short: ASIC’s scope is too broad, its resources are too thin, and its culture is so bad that white-collar crime has been allowed to go unchecked in Australia for far too long.
To address this, the report recommends splitting ASIC into a body focused on corporate crime and another to regulate financial conduct.
Senate Economics Committee Chairman Andrew Bragg was quite blunt about ASIC’s performance.
“ASIC has one job, and that job is to enforce the law, and ASIC has not been focused on enforcing the law. Instead, it has been focused on its own internal problems. And that has meant there has been a white flag waved at white-collar crime, which means people feel they have a license to break the law in Australia.”
He wants Australia to have a corporate cop with teeth:
“I think unless you show that you are prepared to put heads on stakes then you are not going to achieve any change in culture. And I think we need to have fearsome agencies so that people think twice when they want to do the wrong thing.”
The report also recommends amending Australia’s current whistleblower laws to encourage whistleblowers to come forward with information that would “significantly benefit the public” and to compensate those who do come forward, or those “who cannot make a public benefit report without suffering significant personal detriment, such as loss of career prospects”.
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