I wrote the other day about the Department of Labor’s legal position in response to lawsuits alleging that its new fiduciary regulations are illegal, and in that post, I referred to why the regulations have provoked such an outcry, which is that they fundamentally change the manner in which many financial advisers and financial firms operate. I came across a perfect demonstration of that point, which is this article explaining how a financial adviser will now have to act when a client asks advice on, or purchases a product for the purpose of, rolling over 401k assets into an IRA. As the article describes, that action will now, under the new rules, come with a host of steps and potential exposure as a fiduciary. Any of you who have done a rollover lately will certainly immediately see that what is described in the article is nowhere near what you just experienced with a rollover.
While the extent of the change is obvious, its worth asking whether the change is for the good or not: the lawsuits challenging the new regulations basically seek to set them aside on technical legal grounds without challenging whether they are valuable to the consumer of the financial products at issue, while the Department of Labor’s response to those legal challenges starts from the premise that the changes at issue are valuable to those consumers. The article on rollovers certainly describes a process that is more labor intensive, more transparent and puts more legal risk on the adviser involved in the process: however, whether that means better outcomes for consumers is the question, one that is at the heart of the dispute between the financial industry and the Department of Labor.
I would also note that the article does a good job, without actually addressing it, of illustrating why many critics of the new rule view at as being likely to increase litigation and as creating new causes of action that don’t currently exist under ERISA itself. First, as the article illustrates, the adviser – under the new rules – becomes a fiduciary subject to ERISA’s fiduciary duties, which have been the foundation for a wide, and ever expanding, range of legal claims. There is no reason to think that assigning fiduciary status to advisers won’t also have that effect here. Second, the contractual exemption for providing advice and collecting a fee in this context, which are detailed in the article, has a realm of provisions that a good lawyer can allege in a given case were breached, providing yet another avenue for constructing a claim against an adviser if an investment product goes south.