Queensland-based adviser Douglas Cecil Allen has been banned from providing financial services for three years after he was found to have provided clients with misleading or false statements.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) reviewed a sample of his advice files that showed he was using a “layered advice” strategy and found he provided life insurance-related advice that was not in the clients’ best interests and was not appropriate.

ASIC says he failed to reasonably consider a client’s insurance options when recommending a client to consolidate their superannuation.

“Mr Allen did not provide a reasonable assessment of the client’s existing insurance or consider whether there would be insurance consequences for rolling over the client’s superannuation, which may have resulted in them being uninsured for a period,” ASIC said.

He also failed to appropriately scope the superannuation advice to include insurance.

“Such a limited scope resulted in an insufficient assessment of whether the benefits achieved from rolling over a client’s superannuation would outweigh the disadvantages from the loss of the insurance,” ASIC said.

ASIC says his statement of advice documents provided to clients contained product comparison tables that were false or misleading.

The comparisons he prepared “understated the potential insurance costs” despite knowing the insurance premiums would likely be higher once insurance advice was provided, the regulator said.

ASIC says the banning order took effect from March 15 last year and has been recorded on its publicly available Financial Advisers Register and the Banned and Disqualified register.