By Terry Ryder – October 2026

Just when you think Australia’s bureaucratic obsession with rules, regulations and compliance requirements can’t get any more ridiculous, along comes another example of administrative stupidity that beggars belief.

This one involves a major Australian bank freezing the accounts of a customer of more than 40 years, despite that customer having twice provided all the information the bank demanded.

And the customer wasn’t just anybody. He was Noel Whittaker, veteran financial commentator, highly respected finance expert and author of numerous best-selling books on personal finance and wealth creation. I’ve spoken to Whittaker numerous times over the years and have read his books, so I know that he’s smart, sensible and ethical.

I was particularly interested to read about his case, having recently been through similar absurdities with a major bank over their bizarre policies around the KYC (Know Your Customer) rules. In my case, ANZ Bank made my credit card disappear but did not bother to inform me and forced me to go through a lengthy KYC procedure to have it reinstated. Then, two months later, ANZ did the same thing again for the same bureaucratic reason. At the time of writing, this is still being sorted out.

Returning to the Noel Whittaker fiasco: in an article published by the National Business Network on 3 October 2026, Whittaker described an extraordinary experience with St George Bank which should alarm anyone who has money deposited with a financial institution.

Whittaker and his wife, who have banked with St George for more than four decades, received letters demanding they verify their identities and answer a series of questions. These included such gems as the origin of their net worth and the purpose of their bank accounts.

They complied, completed the paperwork and returned it.

Four weeks later, identical letters arrived. So they went through the entire process again, including visiting their accountant to have passport copies certified.

Then, two weeks later, a third demand arrived, asking the same questions.

Understandably, Whittaker had had enough. He lodged a complaint, pointing out that they had already supplied the requested information twice, without any acknowledgement from the bank.

The bank’s response? It froze their accounts.

That’s right. Two longstanding customers, who had done everything requested of them, twice, suddenly found themselves denied access to their own money.

And when Whittaker attempted to resolve the situation, he encountered another familiar feature of Australia’s increasingly dysfunctional institutions: the dreaded 1300 number.

He spent two hours getting the accounts operating again.

This is beyond absurd. In fact, had I not been through a similar farce myself, I might not have believed it.

And the most disturbing aspect is that Whittaker’s experience is far from unique.

After the incident, he contacted AUSTRAC, the Australian Banking Association and senior banking executives. He discovered that identity verification requirements were a major source of customer complaints.

He also heard about an elderly woman who feared she had become the victim of identity theft after receiving similar demands, and a doctor who experienced comparable problems with ANZ. That I can believe: in my experience, ANZ is by far the worst of the major banks for bureaucratic bloody-mindedness and overwhelming incompetence.

How many other Australians are being subjected to this nonsense?

And how many don’t have the knowledge, confidence or contacts of someone like Noel Whittaker to challenge the system?

At the heart of this debacle is Australia’s expanding anti-money-laundering bureaucracy.

Nobody disputes the importance of preventing criminals from laundering money through the financial system.

But there’s a fundamental question that politicians, regulators and bank executives appear reluctant to confront. Are these increasingly intrusive compliance requirements actually catching criminals, or simply making life miserable for millions of law-abiding Australians?

As Whittaker observes in his article, criminals are hardly likely to nominate drug dealing as the source of their wealth when completing a banking questionnaire.

Surely suspicious transactions provide a better indication of criminal activity than answers supplied on a form.

AUSTRAC argues that such information helps banks establish normal customer behaviour so unusual transactions can be identified.

But does achieving this objective require repeatedly demanding the same information from longstanding customers and then freezing their accounts without warning?

This is a classic example of bureaucratic processes overwhelming common sense.

And it extends far beyond banking.

We’ve recently highlighted the extraordinary compliance obligations being imposed on property managers and buyers’ agents under expanding AML (anti-money-laundering) regulations.

These businesses are increasingly expected to perform functions associated with detecting criminal activity, despite having neither the specialist training nor the resources of law enforcement agencies. If they don’t play along, they are hit with massive fines.

Meanwhile, the financial planning industry has been buried under mountains of compliance paperwork, contributing to the soaring cost of professional advice.

The building industry faces its own nightmare of regulations, approvals and administrative obstacles.

Everywhere we look, the same mentality prevails. More rules. More paperwork. More compliance. More costs.

Whittaker makes another important point. Australia already has a serious productivity problem, yet our governments and regulatory agencies continue creating systems that consume enormous amounts of time without necessarily delivering better outcomes.

Consider the hours wasted by customers collecting documents, obtaining certifications, completing forms, waiting on telephone lines and attempting to resolve problems that should never have occurred.

I have personally spent countless hours dealing with the ANZ Bank fiasco – firstly, trying to find out why my credit card had simply disappeared from my menu of accounts without being notified by the bank, and then trying to sort out the problems this had created. And then having to go through the whole process a second time two months later.

Consider the hours wasted by bank employees processing repetitive paperwork and dealing with understandably furious customers.

And consider the damage to trust when a financial institution decides it can arbitrarily prevent people from accessing their own money.

What makes this episode particularly offensive is the apparent absence of common sense or basic customer service.

Why didn’t St George Bank simply telephone or email Whittaker before freezing the accounts? Why didn’t ANZ Bank contact me about their KYC requirements instead of making my credit card disappear, causing scheduled automatic monthly payments to fail?

Why wasn’t the information already supplied by Whittaker properly recorded? Why did a complaint about repeated requests result in the ultimate inconvenience for the customer?

These are elementary questions which any competent organisation should be capable of answering.

But that is the problem with so much of Australia’s bureaucracy, with banks the worst offenders.

The system becomes more important than the people it supposedly serves. Rules are imposed without sufficient consideration of the consequences, and ordinary Australians are left to deal with the fallout.

Noel Whittaker’s experience is especially revealing because he is someone who understands financial institutions better than most Australians. If a respected financial expert with more than 40 years of banking history can be treated this way, what hope does the average customer have?

The most extraordinary aspect of this story is that the bank apparently regarded freezing a customer’s access to their own money as an acceptable administrative response. And in my case, ANZ Bank believed it was perfectly reasonable to eliminate my credit card, not once but twice, without notifying me that they had done so, let alone explaining why.

That tells us something deeply disturbing about the priorities of our major institutions. They have become very good at enforcing compliance requirements. They appear considerably less competent at applying common sense.

And once again, it is ordinary Australians who pay the price for bureaucratic stupidity and corporate arrogance.