Published Works
If you have customer complaints or adverse disclosures reported on your FINRA Central Registration Depository (CRD) against you, those CRD disclosures can seriously hurt your reputation in the securities industry. FINRA CRD complaints may involve claims of sales practice violations, forgery, theft, or misappropriation or conversion of funds. In this article, we take a look…
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Simply put, the answer is yes. FINRA Rule 2080 (“Rule 2080”) is complex and must be followed properly to obtain expungement of a customer complaint from an individual’s BrokerCheck report Rule 2080 requires that a court of competent jurisdiction (state or federal court) confirm an expungement award before FINRA will remove a customer complaint from…
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The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is a self-regulatory agency that oversees all activity within the securities industry. One common area of regulatory scrutiny is customer complaints. Customers of brokers and broker-dealers can file written complaints related to the management of their investments. A written customer complaint (and in some cases oral complaints) becomes part…
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Income Share Agreements (“ISAs”) started out as a way to finance student tuition in higher education. They’ve since expanded to fund attendance at vocational, coding, culinary, and other types of specialty career training schools in marketing, tech, and even venture capital. As a financial instrument, ISAs occupy a nebulous middle ground – they’re not quite…
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America’s distrust in the U.S. government and its lawmakers is at an all-time low. While there is not a single reason for this pervasive skepticism, the daily scandals and controversies that emerge from Congress are probably a good start. One glaring example occurred in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic when numerous members of Congress…
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The 501(d) model of tax exemption echoes all the way back to the use of home-brewed alcohol sales by monks to help keep their monastery running. The tradition of the monastically produced alcoholic beverage goes back over 1,000 years and has yielded the discovery of many a potent potable, from the Trappist style of beer…
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How to Properly Handle Witness Proffers in Criminal and Regulatory Investigations David Rosenfield When you think of Martha Stewart, do you think of cooking shows or white collar criminal cases? Martha Stewart’s case is one of the more infamous and recent to come to mind for most regulatory attorneys. Stewart participated in what’s known as…
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has an onerous problem with Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk.How does the staff enforce securities laws, with mostly draconian remedies, against one of Musk’s tweets that asked a question of a polled Twitter audience? How does the staff decide if discussing a Twitterquestion is considered insider trading? How does…
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Over the past four decades as an attorney (I know it’s been that long!), I have assisted uncountable optimistic and fresh entrepreneurs in building and maintaining their start-up companies. Starting and building a business from the ground up is certainly a challenge many wouldn’t expect as a company grows. For certain, threshold legal and tax…
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