A 20-month inquiry into the corporate watchdog was tabled yesterday. And it wasn’t pretty. 

In one line; ASIC’s ambit is too wide, its resourcing too low and its culture so bad that white collar crime has been allowed to go unchecked in Australia, for too long.

To fix this, the report recommends splitting ASIC up, into one body focused on corporate crime, and another to regulate financial conduct.

Senate Economics Committee chair Andrew Bragg was pretty blunt about ASIC’s performance.

“ASIC has one job, and that job is to enforce the law and ASIC has not been focused on law enforcement. Instead, it’s been focused on its own internal problems. And that has meant that there’s been a white flag waved on white collar crime, which has meant that people feel they have a licence to break the law in Australia.”

He wants to Australia to have a corporate cop with teeth:

“I think that unless you are showing that you are prepared to put heads on the spike, then you’re not going to get any change in culture. And I think we need to have feared agencies so that people think twice when they want to do the wrong thing.”

The report also recommends amending Australia’s current whistleblower legislation to incentivise whistleblowers to come forward with information that would “significantly benefit the public”, and compensate those who do speak out, or those “who are unable to make a disclosure in the public benefit without experiencing significant personal detriment, such as loss of career prospects”.

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