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July 29, 2004 at 08:00 PM
Congress should help the regulators who oversee insurance-investment product hybrids get access to more criminal information and other regulatory information.[@@]
Richard Hillman, financial markets director at the U.S. General Accountability Office, makes that argument in a letter to Rep. Michael Oxley, R-Ohio, chairman of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, about the state of financial services regulatory agency information sharing.
“Information sharing among regulators serves as a key defense against fraud and market abuses,” Hillman writes in the letter. “However, our system of financial regulation is fragmented and, in many cases, isolated among numerous federal and state financial regulators overseeing the securities, insurance and banking industries.”
In the letter, Hillman gives 3 recommendations for improving regulation of hybrid products such as variable annuities, equity-indexed annuities and viatical settlements.
1. Give insurance regulators more consistent access to the nationwide criminal history data maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
2. Improve vehicles for sharing regulatory enforcement data, to keep rogues from migrating from one industry to another.
3. Improve regulatory oversight structures.
