TERRY MCCRANN

A BIG round of applause please for the Tax Office. It’s proudly announced that it’s actually doing its job – you know, getting at least some big taxpayers to pay the tax that they should be paying.

Indeed, in many cases it would seem, it’s got them to pay tax that they should have paid at an earlier date – that’s if it had been doing its job back then rather than just ‘catching up’ now.

The ATO said yesterday that “with the help of the (impressively named) Tax Avoidance Taskforce, we have collected just over $5.6 billion in the first two years”.

That’s a rather curious phrase – “with the help of the Taskforce”: it sort of brings to mind a Tax Office version of a specialist SWAT team; one that’s bristling with laptops and spreadsheets rather than automatic weapons and armoured cars. Or perhaps it has them as well.

But hey, let’s not be churlish – at least the Tax Office is, if a little belatedly, actually doing its job. Not so, according to the Banking Royal Commission, either of the two corporate and financial services regulators, ASIC and APRA.

ASIC is supposed to get the banks (and others) to behave properly, APRA to get them to behave prudently. The first so they don’t rip off their customers (or investors); the second so they don’t send themselves broke and so also end up ripping off their customers and their investors.

So for every failing by a bank and other financial institution identified by the RC there is also a very clear parallel failing by ASIC – a failing both in real-time back whenever and a failing after the event.

But never fear – to digress for a moment – the 2018 ASIC has got its eye firmly fixed on the main game: it has set out to rigorously police any failing by listed companies in detailing their climate risks.

ASIC has devoted considerable resources to examine “climate risk disclosures” by no less than 60 of the top 300 listed companies, 25 recent IPO prospectuses, and some 15,000 annual reports.

Thank goodness ASIC has bounced back from its failure to protect bank customers from being overcharged and ripped off, to ensuring that it will rigorously ensure that no climate risk will go undisclosed across corporate Australia.

Call me cynical, but I doubt though, that the two biggest risks of all will be disclosed.

The first is the all-too real risk of boards and managements actually taking all this nonsense seriously.

The second is just how much at risk companies and businesses are from politicians, bureaucrats and a coalition of insane interest groups and carpet-bagging businesses imposing huge and utterly pointless costs on them and their customers.

I do think the RC was a little unfair on APRA. Its main complaint was that APRA never took anyone to court. Well, APRA’s main job is to ensure banks don’t go broke; and they didn’t.