July 30, 2010
I sincerely hope that you will not use a "fiduciary" standard for regulating or controling investment advisers. I am currently licensed as a life insurance agent, series 7, series 63, series 24, SEC Registered Investment Adviser, Chartered Life Underwriter, Chartered Financial Counsultant, Certified Financial Planner and have Two Masters Degrees. Most of these licenses and educational certifications ALREADY require a huge amount of continuing education as well as regualations. The individual certifications require approximately 100 hours of my time to meet their requirements to maintain certification. There is no need to create additional SEC requirements as a Fiduciary because consumers are protected by the professional organizations for certification, as well as State and existing Federal regulartory organizations who are very good at their job. My RIA firm has been audited by the SEC in the past. I am just a small firm, but they took 3+ weeks to perform a high level audit anyway. This 3 person team was extremely professional and provided me with good suggestions to improve my practice. They found no major issues existing within my RIA. Yet, it took them one whole year to send me the discrepancy letter that was due after the audit. Conclusion = the SEC does not have the time to provide additional "fiduciary" audits. Extra compliance requirements will affect my ability to provide service to my clients. I will have to hire an additional person to handle compliance for all of the additional compliance issues under a new Fiduciary definition.
Please focus your efforts on other areas of SEC concerns to avoid costing the average tax payer more money in this Huge deficit environment that the government has already grown.