After 20 years in the wilderness, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s rehabilitation as a law enforcement agency seems almost complete.<\/p>\n
The regulator says people seeking access for “legitimate business and legal purposes” should still be able to get the addresses, “but we understand there may be challenges for wholesale access providers with their systems and processes”.<\/p>\n
Residential address information is frequently used by lawyers to personally serve company directors with legal documents, by journalists to find people and verify their identities, and by researchers to track ownership and control of companies.<\/p>\n
An ASIC spokesperson said the regulator had “been working to better understand the legitimate business and legal use cases for company office holder address information”.<\/p>\n
“Commencing this week, we will be having discussions with a range of ASIC data consumers to explain this change and to discuss the adjustments they will need to make to ensure that access to office holder residential address information is limited to legitimate business and legal purposes,” the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
The spokesperson said residential information would still be available to journalists via a special journalist portal providing free access to a small number of documents.<\/p>\n
‘Longstanding’ privacy concerns<\/p>\n
Company directors, through their lobby group the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and company secretaries, through the Governance Institute of Australia, have lobbied for residential addresses to be erased from the public record for years.<\/p>\n
Mr Chalmers requested the move in a letter sent to outgoing ASIC chair Joe Longo last Wednesday, the Australian Financial Review reported.<\/p>\n
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Jim Chalmers is understood to have written to Joe Longo (pictured) about the issue. (ABC News: John Gunn)<\/p>\n
In the letter, Mr Chalmers said there had been “longstanding concerns about the availability of directors’ personal information on ASIC business registers” and said he “would support ASIC taking action within its existing powers to remove residential addresses from the company search extracts for the general public as soon as possible”.<\/p>\n