As someone in a highly regulated industry, I can, as you imagine, get a bit annoyed from time to time with regulations. especially in my industry – where regulators miss Bernie Madoff even after being told directly about him by Harry Markopolos, and then sometimes creating numerous nit-picky regulations to try to “prevent” the next Madoff, Stanford or whatever problem they missed (folks, you can’t stop them all – some of these violators are BRILLIANT and would be difficult to catch).
And many of you know that I am not too fond of government so compliments about government from me are hard to come by (so the following might shock a few folks).
But let me tell you how pleased I was with the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office and the MA Securities Division for their work on a recent Investment Advisor Training Conference held in Marlboro, MA.
MA RIA training Conference
First off, I was quite happy to get the invite because my position with regulations and advisors is this:
Most advisors want to do a great job for clients (whether out of desire for service or ego to be the best or anything else) and we also want to run our businesses properly. Therefore, I want to work cooperatively with my regulators.
With that said, Massachusetts’ approach of education and helping us run our businesses in a compliant way is EXACTLY how I think a regulator should do things. Help us know what we should be doing, and we’ll do it. Simple – and MA has figured it out. Best line from the conference in my opinion:
“Our examinations are meant to be corrective not punitive”
Simply awesome. I hope that everyone at MSD means what they say as not only did I learn a lot at the training conference, I also learned that MA regulatory officials listen to advisors and communicate their goal of protecting investors well. If everything they said is true, I am quite pleased to be a MA RIA.
