The APRA and ASIC consultation on FAR streamlining isn’t a signal to relax; it’s a warning that ‘accidental accountability’ has officially reached its use-by date.
I’ve been watching the noise around the Financial Accountability Regime (FAR) for a while now. The recent news that APRA and ASIC have started consulting on ways to streamline the regime might sound like a reprieve—a bit of common sense creeping back into the regulatory landscape. But if you think this means you can go back to business as usual, you’re likely misreading the room.
Streamlining only works if there is something clear to streamline. The regulators aren’t saying, “Never mind about the accountability.” They’re saying they want to make the reporting of it less of a headache. The underlying requirement—knowing exactly who is responsible for what—hasn’t moved an inch. In fact, it’s being sharpened.
The problem I see in most advice practices and professional service firms isn’t a lack of desire to do the right thing. It’s that roles have been defined by gravity, not design. Accountability is usually ‘accidental’—it sits with whoever has been there the longest, whoever happens to be in the office that day, or, most commonly, it all just defaults back to the founder because no one else is quite sure if they have the authority to pull the trigger.
When everything is everyone’s job, it’s actually no one’s job. And when the regulator comes knocking to ask who was responsible for a specific breach or oversight, “We all sort of chip in” isn’t a legal defence. It’s a liability.
If your compliance manual is a thick binder that no one has opened since 2021, you don’t have a compliance system; you have a paperweight. Real accountability doesn’t live in a manual. It lives in the way work flows through your office every Tuesday morning. It’s about being able to point to a specific person and a specific process and say, “That’s where the buck stops.”
I often talk about the ‘hub-and-spoke’ trap where the principal is the only person who can make a decision. This isn’t just a growth bottleneck anymore; under FAR, it’s a regulatory risk. You cannot scale a business—or protect it—if you are the only one accountable for every moving part.
The move toward streamlining is actually a nudge to get your house in order. They want to see functional accountability. They want to see that you’ve done the work to map your roles to your risks. If you haven’t looked at your team structure recently, you’re likely running on a model that was built for a business half your current size.
My advice? Don’t wait for the final consultation paper to land. Take a look at your current team. If you can’t clearly define the decision-making boundaries for every senior role in your firm without looking at an old contract, you have an execution gap that needs fixing.
We need to move away from ‘who’s been here the longest’ and toward ‘who is accountable for this outcome’. It’s safer for the business, it’s clearer for the team, and—honestly—it makes the whole place much easier to run.
If you’re worried that FAR is just more red tape for a team that’s already stretched, the best thing you can do is get a clear picture of where those blurred lines actually sit. A Practice Growth Session is a good place to start pressure-testing your current model, or if you want to get deep into the weeds of how your team is actually spending their time, you can run a Capacity & Profit Diagnostic to see where the friction is costing you money.
Less red tape is a good thing, but only if you have the clarity to handle the freedom.
