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July 25, 2012 at 10:32 AM
As she said she would, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., introduced on Wednesday the Investment Adviser Examination Improvement Act of 2012, which would allow the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to collect user fees from advisors to fund their exams in lieu of a self-regulatory organization (SRO).
In introducing the bill, co-sponsored by Massachusetts Democrats Barney Frank and Michael Capuano, Waters said that “it is absolutely essential that we improve the oversight of investment advisers—the people that manage the assets of millions of individual and institutional investors across the country.”
Since the crisis four years ago, she continued, “we have witnessed an unfortunate deterioration in the public’s confidence in our financial markets. Though the vast majority of investment advisers operate with integrity and want to help their clients meet their financial goals, it is clear that the SEC’s current examination levels need to be augmented in order to bolster the public’s trust in this marketplace.”
Like the Investment Adviser Association (IAA) and the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA), Waters said she believes the user fee approach, rather than the establishment of an SRO to examine advisors as put forth in a bill by her committee’s chairman, Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., “provides the simplest, most efficient solution to the problem of inadequate adviser oversight.”
She said that “because the user fees contemplated in my legislation would only be used to fund the regulation of investment advisers, and not to subsidize other functions at the SEC, I think that this option would be more cost effective for the industry.”
The Financial Coalition, comprised of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and the CFP Board, said in a statement that Waters’ bill was “a credible alternative to the Investment Adviser Oversight Act of 2012 (H.R. 4624), introduced in April [by Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala.], which would impose higher costs and a redundant regulatory burden on small advisory firms by mandating that they join a self-regulatory organization (SRO), in addition to current SEC and state regulatory oversight.”
While admitting that the “the status quo is not acceptable” and that the frequency of advisor exams needs to increase “dramatically,” the coalition added that creating “a new SRO is not the right solution. The burden of excessive regulation and cost would fall unfairly on small-business owners while many larger firms would be exempt and would go unaffected.”
