Should the SEC Step in Where the DOL Has Faltered?
February 22, 2017 | by Thomas Coyle | Financial Advisor IQ
There’s confusion over the prospects of Department of Labor’s new fiduciary rule for retirement accounts. And this tumult — spawned largely by a recent directive from U.S. President Donald Trump for a broad-based re-examination of federal financial regulations and animated by court battles over the DOL’s right to make such a rule in the first place — has been seized on by an industry seemingly reluctant to embrace the President Barack Obama-era change in the first place.
Amid this uncertainty, Charles Goldman, CEO of AssetMark, an investment-platform provider with more than $30 billion under management, says it’s time to get the DOL out of the equation and set the SEC to work on a broader and more pervasive extension of the fiduciary standard for retail financial advisors of all stripes.
In other words, instead of limiting the scope of a “client first” standard of care to retirement accounts, Goldman proposes that retail-oriented stockbrokers and insurance agents be fiduciaries in all cases – not just when they’re dealing with their clients’ 401(k)s, IRAs and Roths.
