Second Set of Draft Prudential Practice Guides
Submission Date: 3 July 2013
On behalf of the Law Council, the Superannuation Committee has reviewed each of the draft prudential practice guides released on 9 May 2013 and this submission makes several technical comments of a legal nature with regard to most of them.
As an introductory general comment, the second set of prudential practice guides, much like the first set of prudential practice guides, takes a highly prescriptive approach to largely operational matters and goes beyond what is expressly required by the associated prudential standards.
All Registrable Superannuation Entities (RSE) licensees by now should have adopted policies for the purposes of complying with the prudential standards ahead of the 1 July 2013 commencement date. As these prudential practice guides are yet to be finalised, it is inevitable that some RSE licensees will, in due course, want to review their recently approved policies with the benefit of the finalised prudential practice guides. This will take some time after the prudential practice guides are released in final form. It would provide comfort to industry if the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) could take a facilitative and staggered approach towards applying the prudential practice guides and reassure the industry that APRA will not, for example, apply the prudential practice guides retrospectively from 1 July 2013.
APRA’s prudential standards expressly require certain policies to be approved by the board of the RSE licensee and, by implication, permit responsibility for other policies to be delegated to relevant sub-committees of the board. To the extent that subsequently released prudential practice guides suggest that additional policies must also be approved by the board (for example, SPG 533 on Valuation), this would be unexpected, and represent an additional burden for RSE licensees.
Read the full submission below.
Last Updated on 07/04/2025