Regulation Impact Statement – Department of the Treasury
On 30 March 2017, the Government introduced legislation to enable the recovery of the regulatory costs of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), commencing 1 July 2017.
ASIC formerly received around 15 per cent of its funding through fees collected from industry participants, but was largely funded through budget appropriations for its regulatory activities. This was inconsistent with the Government’s Charging Framework, which broadly suggests that entities which create the need for regulation should bear the cost of that regulation.
The legislation aims to recover all of the costs related to ASIC’s regulatory activities through a combination of levies and fees for services. When practical, the levies paid by entities would be graduated to closely represent ASIC’s cost of regulation for each industry. Flat levies will be used when the effort ASIC exerts in regulating each entity in a sector is approximately equal or when it is more costly to implement a graduated levy. Industry impacts will be incurred in two ways: through providing additional data each year and through direct levies.
The Department of the Treasury was compliant with the Australian Government RIS requirements. However, the Treasury was not consistent with best practice at the transparency stage. This is because only a summary of the RIS was included in the explanatory memorandum of the bill.
The RIS estimates the measure will increase average regulatory costs across affected businesses by $8.8 million a year. The OBPR has agreed to this estimate.