By Anne Wardell, Compliance Quarter
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) has released a consultation draft of proposed new AER Compliance Procedures and Guidelines. The amendments relate to the new reporting obligations introduced in June 2017. Interested parties are invited to make written submissions on the draft Guideline by 10 November 2017.
The Notice of Draft Instrument (Notice) states that the ‘changes are designed to address
inefficiencies by reducing the time and effort required by businesses in preparing reports and
to improve the overall quality of reporting. The draft notice provides stakeholders with the
opportunity to comment on amendments before a final decision is made.
The proposed amendments seek to:
improve the functionality of the reporting template to include pre-populated data so
as to facilitate completion of the form in a timely manner and ensure reports allow an
informed comparison of compliance levels over time and between businesses;
revise the layout of the reporting template to improve our ability to extract information
from the reports and to allow improved monitoring of reporting trends and identify
emerging areas of concern;
improve the functionality of the template to reduce the opportunity for incorrectly
submitted reports by reducing errors and ensuring the template includes all required
information’.
The proposed changes are set out in Appendix 1 of the Notice with a description of the relevant changes.
The Notice sets out the following explanation of the reason for the changes:
‘The current reporting template requires businesses to fill out two separate areas, see
Appendix 2. The first part requires the information set out Table 1 and second part requires
the business to provide a range of information relating to the breach set out in Table 2. An
issue with Table 1 is businesses often fail to fully complete this table which requires follow
up to ensure reports were submitted correctly and in many cases resubmission of reports.
We propose incorporating this information into the body of the template as this will minimise
this type of error occurring. We propose also deleting “Date of report” field, as we obtain this
information through the submission process’.
Further information and copies of the key documents are available at Compliance procedures and guidelines – October 2017 on the AER website
