The FSA has published its annual report for the year 2004/05, assessing the organisation's progress under each of its three broad aims.
These aims are: to promote efficient, orderly and fair financial markets, both wholesale and retail; to help the retail customer for financial services obtain a fair deal; and to improve its business capability and effectiveness, so as to make the FSA easier to do business with.
FSA chairman, Callum McCarthy, said: "Regulation depends not only on legal powers, but on the effective, proportionate and fair exercise of those powers. We have therefore been much concerned to review our policies and practices to see that the FSA exercises its powers in this way.
"In particular, we are reviewing two aspects of our performance. The first is to examine the costs we impose on those we regulate, both the direct costs of the FSA and the wider costs of compliance, and whether, and if so how, these can properly be reduced. We are doing this jointly with the Practitioner Panel.
"The second is to examine the effectiveness and fairness of our enforcement processes, so that those affected receive decisions which are - and are seen to be - fair; are made promptly; and are not unnecessarily costly - all of which are in their as well as the public interest.
"I do not expect those who are subject to FSA enforcement action to welcome it, but it is important that they and others understand the process and recognise that they have been treated fairly. Both studies raise important issues, which we wish to see discussed openly and on the basis of agreed objective data."
