At the Tuesday, June 3 luncheon session at the FPA Retreat in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., the mood of the audience was turning ugly. Three months before the meeting, the co-chairs, chair-elect and two additional members of the CFP Board of Standards' Disciplinary and Ethics Commission had resigned in protest over Board decisions which, the DEC members say, shifted the power to control the CFP disciplinary processes into the hands of the organization's staff and chief executive officer.

The resigning commission members, among them former co-chairs Harv Ames of Ames Planning Associates in Peterborough, N.H. and Diana Simpson of Fee-only Planning Professionals in Birmingham, Ala.; former chair-elect Barry Kohler of BDMP Wealth Management in Portland, Me.; and former DEC members James Williams of J.F. Williams Associates in Denver and Grace Worley of Worley Financial Group in Indianapolis, believed that the Board's move violated the organization's own bylaws. Despite calls for dialogue, the CFP Board had declined to rethink its decision, and the feeling was that another storm was brewing around the body that governs the CFP mark.

The retreat organizers scheduled the luncheon discussion at the last minute. The idea was to allow attendees to voice their concerns to a panel that included Dave Strege, chair of the CFP Board's board of directors, fellow board member Dan Candura and someone most of the audience had never met: newly installed CFP Board CEO Kevin Keller.

This was Keller's first public appearance in a major financial conference since moving into the CEO's office in May 2007, and he hardly spoke during what must have seemed like a baptism by fire. One prominent planner after another saw in Keller's new authority evidence that the board was, yet again, making decisions that endangered the CFP community—without signaling its intentions or its consulting members.

Dick Wagner and Charlie Hughes, both former presidents of the ICFP (one of the precursors to the CFP Board), weighed in, as did Harold Evensky, a former chair of the CFP Board itself. Elaine Bedel, another past chair of the Board, questioned the organization's persistent culture of secrecy.

Former FPA president Roy Diliberto told the panelists that this was just one more example of the board making poor decisions in seclusion. "It just keeps happening and happening and happening," he said, his voice rising in anger, "and somehow it has to stop."

A History of Controversy

This was precisely the sort of controversy that the CFP Board had hoped to put behind it when it hired Keller, 12 months prior to the conference, from his position as chief operating officer of the Washington-based Association for Financial Professionals. Keller had spent 16 years there, tending a professional volunteer designation not unlike the CFP. (The AFP administers the Certified Treasury Professional mark.)

His predecessors at the CFP Board had not exactly distinguished themselves. Sarah Teslik, the previous CEO, cemented an unfortunate reputation for off-the-wall behavior when she suggested on national television that we should find drug treatments for people who put off saving for their retirement. She also presided over Exhibit B in the case against the CFP Board's decision-making processes: an unfortunate first rewrite of the CFP Standards of Professional Conduct that did not require advisors to meet fiduciary standards.

Lou Garday, who held the position before Teslik, had announced upon arrival that his goal was to grow the ranks of CFP licensees, apparently unaware of concerns that the board was plotting to lower its standards or give the designation to wirehouse representatives. Garday's predecessor, Bob Goss, was involved in a litany of disputes with the CFP community, including what many still cite as Exhibit A in their argument that the CFP Board makes dysfunctional decisions in a vacuum: the attempt, in 1999, to create an Associate CFP designation, which many felt would have irreparably cheapened the mark.

That makes the current dispute Exhibit C, and it touches on what is perhaps the CFP Board's most sensitive role in the marketplace, that of policing its certificants. DEC members meet three times a year in three-person juries to pass judgment on ethics complaints brought against CFP certificants by injured or unhappy clients. This is more than a trial by a jury of peers. During an adjudication meeting, the DEC members also write explanations of how the facts and circumstances were weighed in each decision, creating an emerging body of case law around those aforementioned Standards of Professional Conduct.

This latest controversy centers around a decision by the CFP's board of governors to change the DEC status from an independent commission to one that is supervised directly by Keller and his staff. The move gave Keller the power to appoint the chair and all DEC members, according him indirect but powerful influence over how cases are adjudicated. The CFP Board's most suspicious critics say this gives Keller an opening to create a more lenient policy for brokers and salespersons. A second important change came not from the board but from Keller himself: From now on, adjudication hearings will no longer be private sessions attended only by DEC professional volunteers. Instead, Michael Shaw, a senior member of the board's enforcement staff, will attend the hearings. This, of course, could further increase Keller's (and staff's) power over the process, and, since the CFP Board represents the client's side in the hearings, would seem to give the prosecutors an edge.