Mr. William Prasifka:

I will take the questions in turn. I agree completely with the Senator that the effectiveness of a remedy is the most important thing. The ombudsman is there to decide individual complaints so the remedy must be there for the aggrieved party. The ombudsman is not a regulator. The office is not there to award a penalty or to issue a fine but to award compensation, to give a remedy to a person. That is very important because if someone has no remedy, why should he or she make a complaint? If one is not getting complaints, one is not in the business of being an ombudsman. As the committee goes through the other ombudsmen, one has to ask what is there for a person to make a complaint? For us, we have the full powers so maybe, in some regard. we are best in the class. One has to look at it with that lens for other ombudsmen.

The second point was about name and shame. I can tell the committee it has been our experience that there are many financial institutions who are extremely concerned about potential reputational damage that may come to them by featuring prominently or, in some cases, featuring at all in our table. To be in our table one has to have three or more complaints. It is inevitable that for the largest institutions that they will always be there given the volume of business they do. It is an important lesson. We always had full legal powers. We had full legal powers to award a good deal of compensation but for many institutions we only really got their attention when we had the ability to report on their individual performance. There is a lesson there for some of the other ombudsmen.

In terms of credit unions, it is interesting to note that I am speaking to some people in the credit unions tomorrow so we have the number of complaints there to hand. In the past couple of years, complaints about credit unions have averaged just under 1% of the total number of complaints. This year, they are running at approximately 0.5%. By any context, given the size of the business that is a very good performance. Why is that? We have looked at this for a number of years. It is clear that its product portfolio is simpler, it is relationship based and community based. Where one gets into trouble with people in the financial service providers is if there is no relationship. So much of what we do is looking at whether there is a match-up between the product that is sold and the person who bought it. If one is dealing with an institution which has the customer today, has had them for a number of years, and hopes to have them for the rest of their life, and if they are relationship based they will know the customer better and are more interested in selling them products that will make them want to come back. We think those are very important issues. We receive relatively few complaints about credit unions. Perhaps that is something they should speak about more and it is to their advantage.

The Senator asked if we need any additional powers. On a broad level, the answer is "No". We have full powers. In terms of our proposed amalgamation with the pensions ombudsman, we have been looking at the powers of the pensions ombudsman versus the powers that we have and we have found a few anomalies. For example, when the pensions ombudsman does an investigation, it has the power to compel third parties to give it information if it deems it relevant to its investigation of a complaint. We only have the power to compel the financial service provider for information. Often, what happens in, say, the case of an investment product is that the sale is made by a financial adviser who is the agent of the financial service provider and that person has left the company. We have taken legal advice on this issue. We have no power to compel that person to give us information or to appear if we have an oral hearing. Sometimes that is the critical witness and we have no power in that area. As we are looking at amending the legislation, that may be one area where we would look for additional powers.

The Senator raised the issue of health insurance. We deal with health insurance on a daily basis. We had noticed there was an increase in health insurance complaints going back three and four years ago. This was understandable because the market was becoming more complicated. We had gone from a position of one or two providers to more providers. There were different types of policies and it was clear that a number of complaints were driven by the fact that people did not really understand the coverage they had or the coverage they were getting. We did have a number of complaints in this area. This is one where we make the individual decisions. If we think there are any systemic issues we refer them to the Central Bank but we are not there to give industry guidelines. That is not our job. Our job is to adjudicate individual complaints. Hopefully the industry will learn from that but in terms of further regulations, industry guidelines, these are issues for the regulator and not for ourselves.

The Senator's last question was how I think the committee could be of benefit to us. I welcome the committee looking at the ombudsman's spectrum across all of us. What I would like to see the committee do is to look at the principles of good governance of the Ombudsman Association in the context of each ombudsman. How are they living up to that? Are they effective? Are they independent? If not, why not, and how can they be made better? That is how I think they be of benefit to us.

I am well aware that while we have full powers, many of our fellow ombudsmen do not. There is a useful role for the committee in examining those issues.