Source: FCA By Brigette Rose Australians have come to expect a poor standard of service from our phone and internet providers. Almost everyone you talk to has a horror story about their telecommunications company from bill shock to NBN problems and everything in between. In fact, there were more than 165,000 complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman in the 2017-18 financial year, and 846,454 complaints to telecommunications providers from July to December 2018. The s...

Source: FCA For a 12 month period (1 July 2019 to 30 June 2020), AFCA will accept complaints about the conduct of financial firms dating back to 1 January 2008. AFCA refers to these complaints as "legacy complaints". This is an opportunity for people to resolve older complaints. The usual AFCA process will apply and once the legacy complaint is lodged in AFCA it will be referred back to the financial firm. If the complaint remains unresolved then AFCA will consider and determi...

Source: FCA Financial Counselling Australia and the State and Territory financial counselling associations* join with thousands of Australians, business leaders and community groups in calling on the Government to "Raise the Rate". Financial counsellors are playing their part in a national week of action asking the Federal Government to increase the level of Newstart so that people looking for jobs are not living on the breadline. As part of our contribution to the campaign,...

Consumer Action Law Centre (Consumer Action) has made a formal complaint to the Commonwealth Ombudsman about the Department of Human Services (DHS).  This complaint comes after the department failed on multiple occasions to apply its own policy to address exploitative consumer lease providers using the Centrepay bill-payment system. Since November 2017, Consumer Action has made multiple complaints to DHS about systemic misconduct of consumer lease companies exploiting people through th...

Financial Counselling Australia notes the release today of an ASIC consultation paper about whether it should use its new product intervention powers to rein in the lending practices of companies operating outside the credit laws. The answer is yes.  And it can't happen soon enough. Financial counsellors have been dealing with case after case of a short-term lender using this business model: Cigno. Cigno is not bound by the credit laws because of its unusual structure, which sp...