Advisers have flagged concerns over additional regulatory guidance on oversight of advice fees charged to clients’ superannuation accounts.

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) says the guidance setting out expectations that super trustees should undertake “proactive reviews” of statements of advice (SOAs) may be a breach of the Privacy Act, is excessive and will add to a significant administrative burden for advice planners.

“We believe that trustee reviews of SOAs is unreasonable and may be a breach of the Privacy Act,” acting AFA CEO Phil Anderson said.

“An SOA is an agreement between a client and their financial adviser and contains a great deal of personal information about the client that should not be shared with trustees.”

Last month the prudential and corporate regulators sent a joint letter to registrable superannuation entity trustees, outlining areas they need to look out where advice fee deductions from members’ accounts are concerned.

The letter says trustees are expected to have processes in place to ensure expenditure is appropriate and that over-reliance on member consent should be avoided.

“Instead reliance on the consent should be combined with further trustee oversight practices, in particular, proactive reviews of a sample of statements of advice and/or related documents to evidence the provision of services, either where misconduct is suspected or as part of a regular review,” the letter says.

“While member written consent shows that fees have been properly consented to, reviews of SOAs and other documents for a sample of members provide a further assurance that the expected services have been provided in respect of those fees.

“Reliance on attestations by financial advisers or advice licensees that services have been provided has limitations due to the potential for conflicts of interest, so cannot in all circumstances be relied upon.”

The letter also says when reviewing advice provided, trustees and advisers should have arrangements to enable any appropriate reviews to occur, including communicating to clients that these reviews may occur, to address any privacy concerns clients may have.

AFA says it questions the need for these requirements since there are already multiple layers of consumer protection, including reform measures from the Hayne royal commission, in place.

“There are already a lot of demanding regulations in place,” Mr Anderson said. “All these additional measures just add further to the cost of providing financial advice and inconvenience clients by adding significant complexity and disruption.

“It is appropriate that financial advisers and super funds both argue against this excessive, unnecessary, and costly interference.”

Click here for the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and Australian Securities and Investments Commission joint letter and here for the AFA response.