FSCP decision reveals an underrated benefit of association membership

In 2025, financial adviser Evan James Byrnes completed a course in ethics and professionalism in financial advice. Last week his registration was cancelled, and he was prohibited from being a relevant provider for two and a half years for multiple breaches of the advisers’ code of ethics.

According to the ASIC financial adviser register, Byrnes completed a Kaplan bridging course in ethics last year. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Newcastle, obtained in 1995; a Graduate Diploma in Applied Finance and Investment from the Securities institute, which he obtained in 1999; and a Diploma in Financial Planning which he got in 2001, from the Financial Planning Association (a forerunner of the Financial Advice Association Australia) back when the FPA offered such courses.

In a decision made on 14 October and published on 23 October, the Financial Services and Credit Panel said it “reasonably believed” that Byrnes had contravened s921E (3) of the Corporations Act by “failing to comply with the Code of Ethics’ values of trustworthiness, competence, honesty and diligence, and Standards 1, 2, 4, 7, 8 and 12”.

The FSCP was established within ASIC by the Financial Sector Reform Act 2021 as the single disciplinary body for financial advisers from 1 January 2022 and gave effect to one of the Hayne royal commission’s recommendations.

It is a pool of 24 industry participants appointed by the responsible minister. ASIC draws on the pool to form smaller sitting panels to consider individual relevant provider-related issues, and its powers include banning orders. Each sitting panel includes an ASIC staff member, who chairs the panel, and at least two members from the FSCP pool.

In the Byrnes’ case, the sitting panel found that “over a number of years, Mr Byrnes failed to maintain adequate records of client annual reviews, charged ongoing financial advice fees and did not provide some clients with the services for which those fees were charged”.

Fees for no service surface again

A lot of the issues the panel identified – fees for no service, in particular – sound tediously familiar and were supposedly stamped out by a series of regulatory reforms. 

The ASIC register says Byrnes’ experience as an adviser goes back to at least March 2005 and was unbroken until now. At the time of the FSCP action Byrnes was an authorised representative of B Moses Investment Services and the panel found that Byrnes was “unresponsive to requests from his licensee during audits and investigations into his client annual review arrangements”.

He had previously been authorised by Genesys and Charter. And the register says there had been “no failure” by Byrnes to meet his minimum continuing professional development (CPD) requirements.

But Byrnes’ register entry also notes there are “no memberships or industry associations recorded” and that, perhaps more than anything else recorded in his entry, is telling, and points to a broader issue.

It relates to Standard 12, namely that “individually and in cooperation with peers”, advisers must “uphold and promote the ethical standards of the profession and hold each other accountable for the protection of the public interest”.

An adviser may be well qualified, but qualifications only establish what an adviser knows. Membership of an industry association puts the adviser among people who will notice how that knowledge is used and – it’s a two-way street – expose that adviser to how others do things.

The standard presumes there’s a peer group that the adviser is exposed to. But, it’s a hard standard for an adviser to meet if they have only limited or no peer-group contact.

As a financial adviser association – although, arguably, not yet a professional association – the FAAA’s Professional Code binds its members and invites them to report suspected breaches by other members. But its disciplinary process can deal with FAAA members only, and the FSCP, with its power to ban advisers, sits within ASIC.

In any case, membership of any association is not an iron-clad guarantee that no members will breach professional and ethical standards, and it would not necessarily have prevented anything the FSCP found in its recent decision. 

But that’s an argument for a stronger professional body – with the power to expel individuals from the profession itself – rather than an excuse for not belonging to any associations at all.