Canberra: AustralianSuper, Australia’s largest pension fund, has been fined A$27 million ($17.3 million) after a court ruled that it failed to properly identify and merge duplicate member accounts, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) announced on Friday.
The fund, which manages over A$365 billion in assets for more than 3.5 million members, lacked adequate procedures to consolidate identical accounts for approximately 90,700 members between July 2013 and March 2023, according to ASIC. As a result, affected members collectively incurred losses of around A$69 million due to multiple sets of administration fees and insurance premiums.
“We found this mistake, we reported it, we apologised to impacted members, we compensated them, and we’ve improved our processes to prevent this happening again,” AustralianSuper Chief Executive Paul Schroder said in a statement.
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The pension fund confirmed that it had allocated provisions for the expected penalty in its 2023-2024 financial year accounts and assured that member administration fees would not be increased to cover the fine.
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AustralianSuper initially self-reported the issue in December 2021, acknowledging a potential failure to comply with its obligations under ASIC regulations to consolidate duplicate accounts. In September 2023, ASIC launched legal proceedings against the fund, leading to the recent court ruling.
