A speech by John Price, Commissioner, Australian Securities and Investments Commission at the Annual Employee Ownership Conference (Melbourne, Australia), 21 May 2015
Introduction
ASIC recognises the importance of facilitating employee incentive schemes. These schemes play an important role in promoting mutual interdependence between employers and employees and appropriately incentivising employees. At the same time, the challenge for ASIC is that we must balance this against the need to ensure the appropriate protections for employees are in place.
ASIC has had in place longstanding legal waivers ('relief') to allow employee incentive schemes to be offered without employers needing to comply with all of the disclosure and financial services obligations that normally arise under the law. In other words, over and above what the law allows, ASIC provides additional exemptions to facilitate employee incentive schemes.
In October 2014 ASIC updated and expanded our relief for employee incentive schemes following extensive consultation through a public consultation process.
We wanted to ensure that our relief remained relevant and valuable to the market, particularly given the changes in the way employee incentive schemes operate. The aim of our updated relief is to enhance the relationship between an employer and its employees, with the objective of improving business performance, engaging employees and strengthening employee commitment.