April 16, 2009
Pertaining to the proposal that crd information kept by FINRA and other SRO's on a licensed representative not having adverse events unless the rep has been specifically named as a repondent in a claim, please consider this in oppostion to said proposal. This should be an era of transparency rather than opaqueness, which has contributed to the financial mess we find ourselves in now. I represent as an attorney claimants before FINRA. I presently have over 100 public investors who have claims pending or who are in the process of filing claims. Oftentimes, I try to find what "brokers' have adversely had reported on their crd's and there is nothing there when I know for a fact that there are a number of claimants who have had claims against the broker. It should not only be mandatory that broker/dealers report all claims involving their licensed reps but there should be a strictly enforced deadline for not reporting and a fine for failure to do so. I rarely if ever name the rep in a Statement of Claim. Most claimants' attorneys I know do as I do. If a measure is put in place that disallows a reporting unless the rep is named individually, it will have several negative effects, not the least of which is : (1) it will cause all of us who do this as a profession to begin naming the rep as a matter of course, which is a wasted and unecessary exercise; (2) most importantly such will create a barrier for the public investors who have a right to the openness and transparancy of their regulatory bodies. There should be more reporting and not less.
Charles M. Thompson
Attorney at Law