ACL holders are now required to lodge their Annual Compliance Certificate (your licence renewal). Although the process is the same as last year, the stakes are now higher in terms of your responses and you need to know why.
Besides paying the annual renewal fee, a licensee will be asked a whole series of questions about their business. These questions are all posed in the following way:
As at the annual compliance date did the licensee have a written plan that documented arrangements and systems for compliance with each of the general conduct obligations?
What this really means under the NCCP Act is: “Do you have written policies and procedures in place around your licence obligations, do you have a systematic process of testing yourself against these policies and are you performing that testing, documenting the results and taking action to fix areas that were found to be non-compliant?”
Most importantly, during 2012 ASIC have been running a targeted campaign of proactively checking licensee’s responses to these questions. This will become an enforcement campaign in 2013, so you need to be sure that you are truthfully answering these questions.
As part of your accreditation, licensees are required to take positive steps to be in full compliance with the applicable laws and regulations. Proactive Aggregators will be encouraging their licensees to be compliant.