5 SEC Exam Red Flags: Tom Giachetti

Compliance consigliere Tom Giachetti continued his war last week on consultants selling prepackaged forms and services.

“Compliance is what?” he rhetorically asked, before continuing in typical Giachetti style. “Not forms; Not consultants; it’s BS.”

The chairman of the securities practice group at the law firm Stark & Stark and ThinkAdvisor contributor argued that advisors wouldn’t even do half of the compliance work if the “SEC wasn’t coming after you. Why? Because it takes you away from time spent with clients. You have to justify your existence and prove that you are not a criminal. So it becomes all about getting through an examination.”

Speaking to a morning crowd at a compliance workshop sponsored by Laserfiche and TD Ameritrade that also featured Greg Friedman of software maker Junxure, Giachetti warned the assembled advisors of five red flags the SEC is looking for in exams.

1) Assets Under Management
There is no such thing as “assets under advisement,” he said, so don’t use the term. It’s all about discretionary versus nondiscretionary control that advisors have over their clients’ accounts.

“If you can’t trade it, you can’t count it,” he argued. “The SEC is bringing enforcement actions against firms for grossly exaggerating their AUM to make them seem larger than they are.

“If you say you manage something, you’d better manage it,” he continued. “If the SEC asks how you earn a fee you can’t say, “because my consultant told me so.”

2) Custody

If you serve as a trustee for the client in any capacity, then you custody for them, with all the attendant responsibly that brings. If you pay a client’s taxes, college bills for their children or anything like that, you are a financial intermediary. It is better to have standard letters of authorization. Send them once a year, have the client sign them and then send them back. It’s “a very simple process,” Giachetti says.

3) Performance

“Are you bragging to clients about you performance? If so it will put you on the highest echelon of scrutiny when it comes to SEC enforcement actions. If for any reason your marketing people say, ‘I need numbers,’ you’ve got the wrong marketing people.”

Forget publishing performance net-of-fees versus gross-of-fees, “you have to quote the performance with the highest fee you would have charged on your schedule,” he said.

Finally, if advisors use model portfolios, be aware of dispersion analysis.