Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

The Treasurer has provided the following answer to the honourable senator's question:

(1) In normal circumstances a trustee must rollover or transfer an amount requested by a member in accordance with the request within 30 days of the trustee receiving the required information to process the request. There are some exceptions to this requirement, for example, a trustee may have applied for and received from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) portability relief for a set period of time due to fund specific circumstances or the member may have consented to a longer redemption period at the time of choosing an illiquid investment option.

(2) APRA does not routinely collect data which would allow the collation of all cases of non-compliance as only 'significant' breaches of licence conditions are required to be reported to APRA. Often it is a major event (e.g. an underlying investment scheme is frozen) which may prevent a trustee from processing rollovers that is reported to APRA supervisors. Anecdotally there is limited evidence of non-compliance across the industry. Sometimes delays are due to members not initially providing all the necessary information that will enable a trustee to process the request.

(3) (a) Typically trustees will have service standards built into administration arrangements which are much lower than the legislative requirement.

These will vary from fund to fund, but may be as low as five to ten working days for a rollover to another APRA fund and slightly longer to a self managed superannuation fund where there are additional processing steps.

(b) The time taken to process rollover requests can vary for many reasons. APRA's focus is on the trustee's process, including monitoring compliance with firstly service standards, and secondly the legislative requirement and APRA has not formed a view as to “best practice'.

(4) (a) As noted above APRA does not collect data on the timing of rollovers. (b) N/A.