Inside Money: Logjamming time: why advisers are not alarmed

Financial advisers, of course, have found out the real time and are simply hitting sleep when the alarm goes off. Photo / Thinkstock

A journalist without a deadline will never finish anything - I won't anyway.

But, as everyone in publishing knows, there's a deadline and then there's the real deadline.

"What's the latest I can get this in?" contributors used to ask me in my editorial days and I would lie and say tomorrow.

There are good reasons for this apparent duplicity such as managing workflow or leaving a bit of slack in the system for last-minute changes.

However, anybody who knows about the real deadline tends to work to that rather than the 'soft' deadline publishers and editors might prefer you to adhere to.

It's like finding out your mother has been fiddling with the alarm clock settings to fool you into getting up in time for school - the trick fails as soon as it is discovered.

And that is probably why David Mayhew, the Commissioner for Financial Advisers, is reporting that "too few [financial advisers] are currently getting on with the registration and assessment steps necessary for authorisation".

"There is a real risk that delay now will create a log jam next year," Mayhew said in a statement.

While implementation of the Financial Adviser Act has been subject to numerous delays already, the Securities Commission earlier this year gave advisers a December 1 deadline to comply with the new conditions set out in regulations.

Unfortunately, the Commission also let on that December 1 was one of those 'soft' deadlines that can be safely ignored, telling advisers that March 31 next year was the absolute, final, no-question-about-it, date when applications must be in.

"But that assumes significant numbers have already been processed before 31 March," Mayhew said. "The experience to date has been disappointing and, unless there is more engagement now, there may be insufficient capacity in the system to cope with the volume of applications to be processed in the last three months before the regime is fully in force."

Advisers, of course, have found out the real time and are simply hitting sleep when the alarm goes off.