HA3011 Accounting Report Sample
Purpose of the assessment
Students are required to follow the instructions and announcements posted on Blackboard with regard to the details of the submission instructions and the deadline.
This individual assignment will assess students based on the following Learning Objectives:
1. Explain and assess standard setting procedures, the theoretical model of accounting, including theories of regulation and corporate governance
2. Appreciate an enhanced understanding of the role of conceptual framework and the development in financial reporting environment
3. Apply judgement, communication and problem-solving skills to deal with advanced financial accounting issues
4. Examine, reflect on and evaluate theories that explain corporate social and environmental reporting, including integrated reports and sustainability.
ASIC is one of the main stakeholders of financial reporting in Australia.
General Instructions
• All work must be submitted on Blackboard by the due date and time, along with a completed Assessment Cover Page. Late penalties apply.
• You must name your file with the Unit Code and Student Number (e.g. HA3011-GWA1995).
• Reference sources must be cited in the text of the report and listed appropriately at the end in a reference list using Holmes Institute Adapted Harvard Referencing. Penalties are associated with incorrect citation and referencing.
• Most assessments must be in MS Word format with no spacing, 12-pt Arial font and at least 2cm margins on all four sides with appropriate section headings and page numbers.
• Check that you submit the correct document, as special consideration is not granted if you make a mistake.
• The number of submission attempts you have depends on the course, unit and assessment, and you should check and confirm this number in advance.
• All submissions are automatically passed through SafeAssign to assess academic
integrity.
Required:
i) Summarise the regulations that give ASIC the powers to perform its role. (2 marks)
ii) Identify an online article or news article that describes ASIC enforcing the regulations, particularly for reporting entities, and answer the following questions:
a) Who are the stakeholders involved? (1 mark)
b) What were the issues raised by ASIC and the outcomes? (3 marks)
c) Was it difficult to select the article? Yes or No, and explain. (2 marks)
d) Based on your findings, provide two (2) lessons to inform reporting entities about financial reporting practices in Australia. (2 marks)
Additional Information for Part B:
Your online article or news article must be published from year 2000 to current.
You should access your online article or news article from newspapers, business magazines, or relevant organisation websites and accounting websites. Suggested online websites are listed below, but are not limited to:
• ASIC website https://asic.gov.au/
• ASX website https://www2.asx.com.au/about/media-centre
• AASB website https://aasb.gov.au/
• The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/au
• Herald Sun http://www.heraldsun.com.au/
• The Sydney Morning Herald https://www.smh.com.au/
Search and read several articles before you select the article you will use here.
The chosen article must be referenced using the Holmes Adapted Harvard Referencing style, with the article's hyperlink added to the reference list.
Solution
PART B
i) Summarise the regulations that give ASIC the powers to perform its role.
ASIC is responsible for protect, ease, and improve the functioning of the financial system and the entities inside it by effectively and minimally enforcing the law; empower investors and stakeholders to actively participate in the system. Data about corporations and other organisations is made available to the public as quickly as possible by efficiently processing and storing the information the body gather (ASIC, 2023, p1 (2)). The regulations that give ASIC power are:
Corporations Act 2001: The decisions by the ASIC are taken under this act that sets out laws dealing with the business related entities. University assignment help, the regulations support handling matters about formation of company, officer duties, fundraising and takeovers. ASIC may pursue a wide range of legal options, including criminal and civil charges as well as administrative punishments, to address misbehavior under the scope (Bird and Gilligan, 2016, p330 (3)). All Australians businesses should be able to use a safe and effective financial system; therefore ASIC developed certain long-term objectives to direct our regulation efforts. The work is to become aware of a possible violation of the law. On the basis of this, immediately actions are taken in deliberating the best course of action to follow; nevertheless, ASIC is unable to open an official inquiry into every single incident that may fall under this category. Instead, ASIC carefully choose which cases to investigate to maximize the efficiency with which any illegal action is stopped that is harming the public (Ramsay, 2015 p201 (2)).
Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 (ASIC Act): This act leads ASIC to works to ensure that all Australians have access to transparent and fair capital markets, and encourages investors and customers to make well-informed decisions. The ASIC offers licences to organisations that can provide financial products and then oversees them to guarantee that they are operating in an effective, ethical, and fair manner for their customers (ASIC, 2023, p1 (3)). With this, ASIC identify, prevent, and address illegal activity and also undertake investigations and use enforcement measures. This helps protect Australian consumers and investors from damage, raises standards within the regulated population, and deters future misbehaviour.
Business Names Registration Act 2011: After the national government took over the administration of trade names registers from the individual states and territories, this legislation was enacted to standardise the many trade identities registers into a single national database. ASIC takes care that businesses are formulated under a registered name and thus it is operating in legal and ethical manner (ASIC investigations and enforcement, 2023, p 4(3)).
ii) Identify an online article or news article that describes ASIC enforcing the regulations, particularly for reporting entities, and answer the following questions:
News Article chosen: ASIC embarks on regtech innovation initiative into poor market disclosure (ASIC innovation hub, 2022)
a) Who are the stakeholders involved?
The key stakeholders in the news are Bedrock AI Aus Pty Ltd, DigitalX Limited, Eastern Analytica Pty Ltd, Listcorp Pty Ltd and Pyxta Pty Ltd. These businesses are dealing with the challenges of corporate disclosure and ASIC is looking into this matter. Here, regtech means The Business Research and Innovation Initiative (BRII) will assist organisation in developing novel approaches to addressing challenges in public policy and service delivery. To that end, businesses will be focusing on regulatory technology (RegTech), which employs computerised methods to streamline governmental operations and business ethics compliance (ASIC media release, 2022).
The external stakeholder include the role of government that has given this initiative evaluates the effectiveness of regtech in meeting the needs of various government entities.
b) What were the issues raised by ASIC and the outcomes?
The problem that ASIC has chosen to investigate is how business may use technology to better detect and evaluate cases of insufficient market disclosure by publicly traded corporations. In this initiative $100,000 is granted to small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) to carry out the feasibility study in relation to the corporate disclosure challenge (ASIC media release, 2022 p3(3)). Here, having the support of regulation ASIC Act 2001, ASIC is responsible to work with 5 SMEs and participate in the overall feasibility stage to assess the root cause behind the problem. BRII also gives additional support to business by offering grant of $1 million to test the proof of the concept in 15 months.
Thus, ASIC deliberately designed a challenge that market disclosure is the ongoing problem and with that regtech solutions could be applied to the cases by the agencies. Thus, ASIC has supported towards the innovative solutions and has the ability to transform the businesses by reducing the regulatory burden and is also supporting the market integrity. Therefore, ASIC always have the objectives of monitoring if finances are available for the growth of businesses and also in legal context (Aus industry, 2022, p1(3)).
The goal of ASIC's BRII challenge is to have applicants provide a technological solution that will enable ASIC analyse company disclosures and other datasets in order to find and evaluate listed firms' compliance with different regulations. The range of requirements are Financial reporting requirements, the ban against deceptive or deceptive information (such as misleading categorization of market notifications), and the ban against acts that affect the pricing of shares.
There has been no letup in ASIC's support for enterprises and technologies that benefit consumers, investors, and markets. ASIC's commitment to advancing regtech's use to improve compliance requirements and consumer outcomes is in line with the agency's Corporate Plan 2021–25. RegTech firms and scaleups in Australia that meet certain criteria may get informal support from ASIC's Innovation Hub as they work to refine their offerings.
Solution with this by ASIC will drive to automate the analysis of documents and materials. Thus, regulatory bodies and regulated businesses might see the solution as proof of the technology's capabilities. This includes assisting with the detection and evaluation of a variety of conduct of business and disclosure responsibilities outside capital markets that firms may be subject to. Contribution to ASIC would be based on enhancing the market integrity and delivering better outcomes for investors and also for the SMEs. The solution aims to provide ASIC with a more efficient and effective way of monitoring and enforcing listed businesses' adherence to their disclosure, reporting, and conducting of business duties (Latimer and Duffy, 2019 p130(4)).
c) Was it difficult to select the article? Yes or No, and explain
No, it was not much difficult to select the article because the ASIC website is easily accessible. Only challenge faced is that there were many news and online articles and choosing the one was little difficult. The article provides immense information about how ASIC have worked on the suitable problem. Thus, easy access to the website has helped me in finding the news article easily.
d) Based on your findings, provide two (2) lessons to inform reporting entities about financial reporting practices in Australia
Knowing about the role, practices and follow the regulations by ASIC was very interesting and much information could be collected about the financial reporting practices. From the findings, it could be assessed that ASIC is one of the independent government body that is personally working with the businesses to understand the corporate market and to bring improvement in financial sector of Australia (Taylor and Wagland, 2013, p72(2)). Thus, financial reports are required to be prepared and lodged with ASIC by all Australian businesses, typically at the end of each financial year. Financial statements must be audited annually. Some businesses may not be required to provide annual financial statements. ASIC makes sure that financial reporting is also in relation to the corporation act and generally it supports in growth of the business by providing them funds through grants and available facilities of the initiatives that are organised by the government (ASIC innovation hub, 2022, p2(3)).
The majority of ASIC's clients are small businesses. The majority of enterprises and organisations in Australia (more than 90%) who are registered with ASIC have less than 20 workers. Half of all Australians find employment at one of the country's many small businesses, and these businesses account for a fifth of Australia's GDP. When it comes to financial services and credit licensees, the vast majority of both ASIC's licensees and the customers who utilise their services are themselves small companies (Ramsay, 2015, p198(3)).
For new financial technology companies to gain confidence from investors and customers, ASIC created the Innovation Hub. Most new financial technology companies are quite modest in size. The ASIC's senior personnel is made available to these companies via the Innovation Hub in order to facilitate the simplification of licencing procedures. Up addition, they provide unofficial direction to fill in any gaps in expertise or materials. Through its Innovation Hub programme, ASIC is having conversations with businesses on regulatory technology's potential and current state (ASIC, 2023, p3(3)).
Therefore, Australian market has an authentic government body that is looking towards scalability of the business.
References
1. ASIC innovation hub, 2022 [Online] [Accessed through] https://asic.gov.au/for-business/innovation-hub/news/ [Accessed on 24th January, 2023]
2. ASIC investigations and enforcement, 2023 [Online] [Accessed through] https://asic.gov.au/about-asic/asic-investigations-and-enforcement/asic-s-approach-to-enforcement/#:~:text=These%20laws%20include%20the%20Corporations,Sector%20Reform%20(Hayne%20Royal%20Commission [Accessed on 24th January, 2023]
3. ASIC media release, 2022 [Online] [Accessed through] https://asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/find-a-media-release/2022-releases/22-005mr-asic-embarks-on-regtech-innovation-initiative-into-poor-market-disclosure/ [Accessed on 24th January, 2023]
4. ASIC, 2023 [Online] [Accessed through] <https://asic.gov.au/about-asic/what-we-do/our-role/> [Accessed on 24th January, 2023]
5. Aus industry, 2022 [Online] [Accessed through] https://business.gov.au/-/media/grants-and-programs/brii/regtech/brii-regulatory-technology-factsheet-poor-market-disclosure-pdf.ashx?sc_lang=en&hash=C1A7D17F3F7214E86D90BAF3F360330B [Accessed on 24th January, 2023]
6. Bird, H. and Gilligan, G., 2016. Deterring corporate wrongdoing: penalties, financial services misconduct and the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). Company and Securities Law Journal, 34(5), pp.332-359. https://research.monash.edu/en/publications/deterring-corporate-wrongdoing-penalties-financial-services-misco
7. Latimer, P. and Duffy, M., 2019. Deconstructing digital currency and its risks: Why ASIC must rise to the regulatory challenge. Federal Law Review, 47(1), pp.121-150. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0067205X18816237
8. Ramsay, I., 2015. Enforcement of continuous disclosure laws by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Company and Securities Law Journal, 33(3), pp.196-204. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2601877
9. Taylor, S.M. and Wagland, S., 2013. The solution to the financial literacy problem: what is the answer?. Australasian Accounting, Business and Finance Journal, 7(3), pp.69-90. https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1451&context=aabfj
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