FINRA Moves Ahead on Expungement Changes

Sam Edwards, president of the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association (PIABA),a group for lawyers that represent investors in disputes with the securities industry, told ThinkAdvisor on Friday in an email that FINRA’s proposed expungement rule changes “help to fill in some of the holes in the expungement process” that a PIABA Foundation report from a year ago pointed out.

As noted in that report, Edwards said, “brokers and a handful of law firms have been manipulating the process in a way that completely undermined the expungement system, resulting in expungement being commonplace, instead of the extraordinary remedy expungement is supposed to be.”

While the changes to FINRA’s arbitration rules “should help some of those known problems, ultimately, the expungement process will never be fixed while it is a part of the FINRA arbitration system,” Edwards added. “That system was not built to handle expungements, but rather disputes between parties. Expungement is really a regulatory issue and should be handled as such, instead of trying to force it into the arbitration process.”

— Related on ThinkAdvisor:

• FINRA’s New Arb Award Rules Merely ‘Nibbling’ at Bigger Problem: PIABA
• Ex-Rep Wins FINRA Arb Case Against Morgan Stanley
• FINRA Seeks to Close ‘$1 Expungement Case’ Loophole