The CFP Board, which
A Financial Planning analysis found that the CFP Board's own sanction practices sharply diverge from those of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a government-authorized, self-regulatory organization responsible for overseeing brokerage firms and their registered representatives in the United States.
More than 1 in 10 CFPs who have no sanctions from the CFP Board on the LetsMakeAPlan.org site have at least one disclosure listed on their BrokerCheck profiles, according to a Financial Planning analysis.
The CFP Board does not reprint disclosures directly from BrokerCheck onto LetsMakeAPlan.org, citing concerns that such disclosures often include unproven allegations. Instead, the board includes public sanctions issued by its own Disciplinary and Ethics Commission.
"A lot of time, these are just complaints that never get resolved, and a lot of times it's the broker's word versus the consumer's word," said Tom Sporkin, head of enforcement at the CFP Board.
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A financial planner might then have a clean record with the CFP Board, even while having numerous complaints and disciplinary actions on file with BrokerCheck, a tool created by FINRA that allows industry professionals and investors to research the background and experience of financial advisors and firms. On LetsMakeAPlan.org, links to these external records are buried in fine print on the advisor's profile, often overshadowed by a prominent declaration that the CFP Board has found no violations of its own standards.
Financial Planning compared sanction information on the LetsMakeAPlan.org website to disclosure information on FINRA's BrokerCheck website. Across more than 69,000 CFPs with profiles on the search tool, over 9,000 CFPs who appear as clean on the LetsMakeAPlan.org site have at least one disclosure on BrokerCheck.
Among the CFPs identified in Financial Planning's analysis as having disclosures on BrokerCheck, more than 7,300 have faced formal complaints from their clients over issues including poor investment recommendations and sales practices. Hundreds of CFPs have been disciplined by financial regulators or left brokerage firms amid allegations of misconduct. Nearly 1,000 CFPs have some form of criminal disclosure on their BrokerCheck profiles, including charges of domestic violence, false imprisonment and stalking.
In 2019, a
In response to The Journal's reporting, the CFP Board issued a statement that outlined a list of changes it would make to its review process, including expanding background checks of CFPs and adding links on advisor profiles to their BrokerCheck and Investment Adviser Public Disclosure profiles.
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CFPs who appear on the LetsMakeAPlan.org site can have two types of disclosures on their profiles: disciplinary actions imposed by the CFP Board or bankruptcy disclosures that occurred within the last decade. Both of these sections are highlighted in bold, 18-point headers on a CFP's profile.
To complicate matters, bankruptcy disclosures that have occurred since June 30, 2020, are not automatically included on a CFP's profile. Instead, the board will only note that a CFP has undergone bankruptcy if it resulted in a public sanction by the board. In certain cases, a CFP can avoid having a recent bankruptcy disclosed on their profile if they can make a case to the board that the bankruptcy does not reflect on their ability to responsibly manage their financial affairs or the financial affairs of the business.
Under the headers for sanctions and bankruptcies on LetsMakeAPlan.org, there is a nearly 500-word description of what information the CFP Board includes in its disclosure section, including links to the advisor's profile on BrokerCheck and IAPD, if they're available. Until recently, the CFP Board placed those links under a drop-down button containing the words "Read More" in smaller 13-point text. During FP's reporting of this story, the CFP Board modified the website to show IAPD and BrokerCheck links without first clicking on a drop-down button, though those links are still much further down the page than CFP actions.
Financial advisors like John Robinson, the founder of Financial Planning Hawaii and a longtime critic of the board's enforcement practices, said that accessing those links is unrealistic for most consumers, and that their inclusion is little more than "lip service."
"As you and I both know, most people don't even go to the CFP verification site. Most people wouldn't even know how to find it," he said. "And if they're on that site, there's so much text on the site that most people wouldn't even think to go to BrokerCheck."
Sporkin said that the organization is proud of its current approach.
"What's the alternative? … The balancing of all of the points of view, we believe, was handled appropriately by linking directly to the source," Sporkin said.
Following The Journal's report, the board also created an independent task force to "
By 2020, the CFP Board's updated background checks "
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In conducting background checks, the board said that it "
The CFP Board opted not to pursue cases involving only a single drug- or alcohol-related offense, a single judgment or tax lien under $50,000, or customer complaints that were either dismissed by the CFP professional's firm or settled for less than $25,000. Events older than seven years were also disregarded unless accompanied by a more recent occurrence.
Complaints many, but not on CFP Board site
In the years since, many of the advisors identified by The Wall Street Journal have been either removed from the search tool or had sanctions added to their profiles. But others, like Carl Heick III, a financial advisor at Cardinal Pointe Financial Group in Louisville, Kentucky, remain unchanged.
Heick, who has 96 customer complaints and a temporary state regulatory suspension on his BrokerCheck profile, showed up as having no sanctions on the LetsMakeAPlan.org site at the time of The Journal's report. The disputes, most of which alleged that Heick sold unsuitable mutual funds to some of his clients, were settled without any admission of wrongdoing. Heick still does not have any sanctions listed on his LetsMakeAPlan.org profile nearly six years after he was initially highlighted by The Journal's coverage.
Heick's disclosures span from 2001 to 2007, which would have excluded him from investigation by the CFP Board due to their seven-year threshold for opening a case.
"If something was more than seven years old, we didn't look at it because that's unfair," Sporkin said. "It's a resource issue, but it's also unfair to people."
Robinson has criticized the CFP Board's response to The Journal's findings.
"What they did was basically go out on an all-out PR campaign and gave the appearance that they were very concerned about that problem," Robinson said. "So they hired a former SEC attorney to join their board. They put a task force together, and with this task force … they gave them a very, very narrow set of things to investigate so they could say, 'We agree with the findings of this report. We'll implement them.' And at the end of the day, they did nothing."
Formal complaints regarding investment recommendations and sales practices have been filed against over 7,300 CFPs identified in Financial Planning's analysis. Hundreds of CFPs were disciplined by regulators or departed from their firms due to allegations of misconduct, BrokerCheck disclosures indicate.
On LetsMakeAPlan.org, some 250 advisors have at least one sanction included on their profiles. That accounts for less than 3% of the total number of CFPs on the search tool who have disclosures listed on FINRA's BrokerCheck website.
Stephen Hester, a financial advisor at Cardinal Pointe Financial Group in Sierra Vista, Arizona, received 66 customer complaints between 2002 and 2010 on BrokerCheck. Those disclosures mostly center on complaints that Hester sold clients mutual funds not suitable for client objectives, assets and risk tolerances.
Those were settled for millions of dollars, with most claiming that Hester did not contribute to the settlements, which were made by his employers who wanted to avoid the costs of lawsuits. One settlement, for $114,000 in 2006, however, does not include that language.
On LetsMakeAPlan.org, Hester has no record of a sanction.
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Joel Freedman, the managing director at Eclipse Private Wealth Management in Radnor, Pennsylvania, has three disclosures on his BrokerCheck profile, including a customer dispute from January of last year that was settled for $1.3 million. In the dispute, one of Freedman's clients alleged that he executed unauthorized trades in their account while working as an advisor at Morgan Stanley.
Following the settlement, Freedman voluntarily resigned from Morgan Stanley in March 2024. By the next month, Freedman launched Eclipse, an independent firm that he runs with his daughter. Despite having three disclosures on his BrokerCheck profile, Freedman's profile on LetsMakeAPlan.org has no disclosures or sanctions.
In 2024, the CFP Board launched 1,148 investigations after reviewing multiple sources — including BrokerCheck, IAPD, public records, social media, news reports, other publicly available information and complaints from the public — for signs of potential misconduct.
The CFP Board has said that its sanctioning process is intended to be both credible to the public and fair to CFPs, who can sometimes receive disclosures on their BrokerCheck profiles at no fault of their own.
Jorge Bravo, the managing director of investments at Nationwide Planning Associates in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was the subject of a regulatory action taken by the state of Massachusetts and 26 separate customer complaints between 2003 and 2021, totaling more than $5.6 million in settlements. On LetsMakeAPlan.org, he has no sanctions listed.
In comments to FINRA, Bravo argued that the customer complaints he received were a result of misleading information provided to him and his clients by his firm, UBS.
"Unbeknownst to me, when I moved to UBS, UBS was undergoing an internal crisis," Bravo wrote. "UBS misled both its brokers and its customers about the UBS Puerto Rican closed-end funds. Their management engaged in a concerted effort to artificially preserve the viability of the market for the Puerto Rican closed-end funds. As a result of UBS's misrepresentations and unlawful sales efforts, more than 100 of my customers bought the toxic PR Funds for their accounts."
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False criminal charges and denied customer complaints can tarnish an advisor's image, even when such disclosures have no impact on their proficiency as a financial professional, Robinson said.
"I actually feel badly for some of those people," Robinson said.
"I do think there should be a way for advisors to be able to clean their [Form] U4s a little bit. … But I do think where there's smoke, there's fire, and consumers should be aware if someone has three or four complaints against them," he added.
Adam Gana, president of the Public Investors Advocate Bar Association, said that it is "reasonable for the end user, the investor, to want as much information as possible in as many places as possible."
Gana said that he appreciates the progress the CFP Board has made since The Journal's 2019 report, but would like to see the organization include BrokerCheck disclosure information directly on the LetsMakeAPlan.org website.
No plans to expand info on LetMakeAPlan.org
The CFP Board has not indicated any intention to include BrokerCheck disclosures on the LetsMakeAPlan.org site besides the links it provides. According to Sporkin, most of the disclosures on BrokerCheck are simply "unproven allegations," making the practice of reprinting them on their own site potentially costly.
To illustrate his point, Sporkin pointed to the case of Randy Anderson, a financial advisor and CFP who was fired by UBS in November 2020.
In June, a FINRA arbitration panel awarded Anderson
"That's the danger if you print from BrokerCheck onto our website," Sporkin said. "That person's career was essentially damaged to the amount of a million dollars. And so … you can't pull information into our environment from a database that has unproven allegations that haven't been through a due process system. If we would have printed that information, there could have been severe consequences for what we would have done. So we don't print from BrokerCheck."
CFP Board general counsel Leo Rydzewski said that reprinting disclosures on the LetsMakeAPlan.org site would also pose a cumbersome technical undertaking for the organization.
"It would be an enormous challenge, impractical and ineffective for us to duplicate every word that's in those enormous databases on our website," Rydzewski said. "What we do is provide a link directly to that website where an individual who's looking for that information can see its full content, up to date, current, that's being provided by both BrokerCheck and IAPD."
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'A huge disservice to customer trust'
Critics like Allan Roth, the founder of Wealth Logic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, say the CFP Board's practices are not in the best interest of the public, however.
"Their behavior is 100% consistent with revenue maximization, 0% consistent with protecting the public and upholding a standard of excellence," Roth said.
Roth, who has been a
Choosing not to include BrokerCheck disclosures on the LetsMakeAPlan.org site is "betraying" investors and CFPs alike, according to Roth, who has held the CFP mark since 2004.
"What they're doing is not only betraying investors, but it's betraying the vast majority of CFPs that want to do a good job, that want to be held to a higher standard, and don't want to be held in comparison to the … CFPs that have disciplinary action," Roth said.
Gana, who has worked with the CFP Board previously through PIABA, suggested that the board is looking to strike a balance between retaining CFPs and providing disclosures to investors.
"I think more disclosure is better, right? So the more that they could put on the LetsMakeAPlan.org tool, the better for the consumer, for the end user, the individual looking for a financial advisor," Gana said. "I understand that they probably have to weigh that against the number of members they might lose by including that information directly on their site. I get that. But I am in favor of more disclosure generally."
Regardless of the potential fallout from including such disclosures, advisors like Robinson say that consumer protections need to be the top priority in the industry.
"At the end of the day, it really needs to be about the consumer above all else, that really the consumer protection is everything," Robinson said. "The consumers aren't equipped, aren't sophisticated enough to protect themselves or to do due diligence they need to. So the regulatory environment needs to protect the consumers, and the CFP Board does a huge disservice to consumer trust when they do that."
