Only 15 per cent of accountants in public practice providing advice on self-managed superannuation funds (SMSF) are authorised to provide investment advice while another 13 per cent are only RG146 compliant.
The total number of accountants in public practice and advising SMSFs are 33,000, or about 86 per cent of the 38,000 accountants currently working in the public practice sector according to data collected by Investment Trends.
Of those 33,000 accountants providing advice only 5,000 are authorised representatives able to provide investment advice with a further 4,500 being RG146 compliant while 23,5000 are not RG146 compliant according to Investment Trends senior analyst Recep III Peker.
He said the collation of this data was the first time anyone had made a serious effort to count the level of accountants in public practice offering SMSF advice and was part of research conducted in conjunction with OneVue to discover the use of SMSF administration services by accountants and SMSF trustees.
Peker said of the 530,000 SMSFs currently in operation 75,000 were administered by financial planners and 265,000 were administered by accountants and 95,000 were administered by an SMSF administration service.
However this latter number climbed to 150,000 when including the number of funds that have their administration outsourced to a third-party administration provider.
According to the OneVue/Investment Trends 2014 SMSF Accountant Report produced from the data this figure had grown by 35,000 in the past 12 months indicating a growing trend among accountants, financial planners and SMSF trustees to use a specialist administration provider.
"Last year it was estimated that 115,000 SMSF trustees utilised the services of SMSF administrators, This year there's been a 30 percent increase, with SMSFs indicating the key reasons are ease of use, low cost and admin efficiency," OneVue head of platform strategy, sales and service, David Storm said.
