Financial planners who are not members of the FPA should still have a better understanding of the association's code of conduct as it is the standard used by regulators and courts, an FPA executive said.
FPA chief professional officer Deen Sanders said the association's code is the model used by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and ASIC.
"Even when they are not a member of the FPA the FPA's code of professional conduct is the set of professional standards for financial planning in Australia," Sanders said.
"That is something that's not terribly well understood and is important for the industry to understand and engage with because even when they are not members it is the model that is used by FOS, ASIC and the courts as a point of reference."
Sanders said issues raised in the industry and those highlighted in the latest ASIC Shadow Shop Survey could be linked back to breaches of the code.
"Obviously complaints in any scheme, be it FOS, FPA or even ASIC tend to be reflective of market conditions and other issues generally," he said.
"Our view is that all of the issues that were raised in the shadow shopper and the concerns in the poor advice group that ASIC reported on could realistically be linked back to people failing to meet the obligations of the code."
In terms of FPA complaints for 2012, Sanders said "numbers remain stable".
"People tend to initiate a complaint when they have lost money. So our numbers remain stable. They haven't been accelerating though," he said.
"They have come down substantially since the high point of the GFC [global financial crisis] but that shouldn't be a surprise."
Last week, Sanders told a briefing the FPA planned to continue working with ASIC on future shadow shopping surveys and other programs.
The association was involved in the corporate regulator's latest retirement shadow shop survey in terms of creating benchmarks and using its code as a reference for those benchmarks.
