Super Void: what super funds are telling regulators is not what they are telling customers

Compare the pair. Thulasisi Sivapalan is Australia’s most prolific super fund investor. The PhD researcher from UTS tried to join 41 super funds just to get their financial statements. It was a tough journey; navigating mystified admin people, unhelpful regulators at APRA, even an abattoir. On a mission to find out how much tax super funds pay, Thulasisi discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in discrepancies between what Australia’s super funds were telling their investors and what they were reporting to APRA. Callum Foote reports on a peculiar road-trip.