At the G100 and CPA Australia Annual Reporting Luncheon in Melbourne on 13 October, ASIC Chair Sarah Court left little doubt about where the regulator's attention sits, stating that “strengthening financial reporting and audit” now sits as “one of [ASIC’s] five top strategic priorities.”

The message was clear. ASIC is making reporting failures harder to walk away from. In the words of Ms. Court “we are working to ensure that the consequences of reporting and audit failures are harder to avoid”. The record supports this, with more than $5 million in infringement notices for late or non lodged financial reports since August 2025, over $1 million in penalties against three public companies in a single day, proceedings against BDO Audit and Auditeo Australia, and an ongoing surveillance of the Big Four with findings due before year end. Reporting failures are rarely isolated accounting errors. More often they reflect governance gaps, controls that exist on paper but cannot be evidenced when it matters.

She was equally clear on first principles. “Firstly, accurate, accessible and reliable financial information is essential for business and markets to work well. It is not just good practice, of course it is the law.”

With the upcoming introduction of External Reporting Australia (ERA) this December, it is more important than ever to ensure accounting, auditing and assurance standards are of the highest quality. It is undeniable that the entire reporting system is being tightened leaving outdated, fragmented approaches to governance vulnerable.

For finance leaders, the implication runs well upstream of the annual report. Financial statements are only as reliable as the transactions beneath them, and these transactions are where fraud, duplicate payments, contract leakage and unverified supplier changes silently erode reliability. Controls that rely on periodic sampling or after the fact review leave gaps that auditors, and increasingly regulators, are unwilling to accept.

RedOwl checks transactions and payments in real time, before money leaves the business, and records every check, flag and approval in an attributable audit trail. That is the evidence base directors and auditors need when reported numbers are questioned.

With the consequences of reporting failure becoming harder to avoid, how confident are you that your controls would stand up to scrutiny?

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References/Link to article

  • Sarah Court, ASIC Chair, Trust, transparency and the future of financial reporting, speech to the G100 and CPA Australia Annual Reporting Luncheon, Melbourne, 13 October 2026: asic.gov.au. Source of all quotes, enforcement figures and Big Four surveillance details.