Financial Planning Litigation
Dolman Bateman & Co Pty Ltd are specialist Forensic Accountants and Financial Advisors. We have been providing Expert Reports and Advice in Financial Planning Litigation for the past 10 years.
We have the practical experience that you can only get when operating a full-service Chartered Accountancy Practice and Financial Services Practice. Our team is experienced in all aspects of Accounting, Tax, and Financial Services.
Education, Qualifications, and Experience are the basics for an Expert to give a proper opinion – our team has all 3.
We have been involved in Financial Planning Litigation for over 10 years, offering our professional opinion on negligent advice and calculation of losses. We have been working for both defendants and plaintiffs.
Whilst losses are made, it is not always that the advice was negligent and this should be considered before the path to litigation is commenced.
Our years of experience mean that we have a great deal of knowledge of numerous products and schemes.
Many of the products we have seen were never going to make a positive return.
Example
An example of this was a certain bank’s financial product spruiked by one of its top-performing advisors. The product simply was spruiked as providing a % return on page 4 which sounded fine but by the time the 90+ page Statement of Advice and the same sized Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) and all of the advisor’s advice documentation was analysed, the cost of the product was always going to be in excess of the return.
People trust the banks and their advisors and it is our experience that most people – not even financial advisors read the PDSs.
Many times, after our analysis, we have found the products recommended by the financial advisors were not appropriate for the client’s particular needs and in some cases not appropriate for anybody!
Another problem is that Financial Advisors often give taxation advice, they do not have tax agent’s licences and the years of tax education that a qualified tax accountant has and we have found some atrocious advice.For eg,
- Buy your house, your holiday house, or a house for your children in an SMSF.
- Borrowing money from trustee to build a property in an SMSF and the trustee (builder) building the property.
- Negative gearing for property in a Trust, the problem is there is no other income in the trust and there are also land tax issues.
- Buy property, or growth assets in a company.
- Advice re transfer of various assets into a superfund – in one case this resulted in huge capital gains tax on $13m of shares and property, stamp duty on the property. The total transfer needed to be reversed as the superfund was now non-compliant. This caused another round of stamp duty. The advisor stated that it was just a transfer and not a sale and therefore no taxes or stamp duty !!
There are too many tales to tell. It’s unfortunately not just financial advisors that give negligent advice but accountants also.