Fiduciary Rule Meetings Disappointed Agent Groups
Cadin, Finseca’s CEO, also expressed disappointment about the lack of Labor Department and OMB dialog.
“I continue to believe this is an ideological campaign by the DOL to ban commissions, as evidenced by their inflammatory and offensive framing of this rule when they initially proposed it, the lightning pace they have pushed this rule through, and the lack of questions or even spirited debate on the substantive issues within this rule,” he said Thursday in a LinkedIn post.
Finseca received no questions when it gave the Labor Department a presentation on its concerns, Cadin said.
“This week,” he said, “we received zero questions and zero comments in our meeting with OMB and DOL.”
Kent Mason, an attorney with Davis & Harman who is representing other organizations that have concerns about the fiduciary definition effort, has been talking about the speed of EBSA’s drafting process since the draft emerged, in late 2023.
“OMB has shown a disregard for input from the public,” Mason said. “My meeting was scheduled for Monday; it has been canceled without notice.”
A group that had a meeting scheduled for Friday, the Alternative & Direct Investment Securities Association, had the session canceled without notice, he said.
“We knew that OMB was rubber stamping the final rule,” Mason said. “So, what this has done is publicly confirm that.”
The future: At press time, the Labor Department had not released the final text of the regulation. Federal departments sometimes make dramatic changes in the text of regulations between the initial drafting stage and the finalization stage.
Even after an agency posts the final text of a regulation, it may change the text or withdraw the text before it is published in the Federal Register and the process of creating a final regulation is completed.
Both Cadin and Mayeux emphasized that their organizations will work with each other and with other organizations to fight the fiduciary definition regulation if the final version looks like the draft released in the fall.
Mayeux noted that the groups and members of Congress will “pursue nonregulatory means of protecting American consumers from the consequences of the DOL rule.”
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