Longtime investor advocate Barbara Roper, who currently directs the Investor Protection unit for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), is joining the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Roper will serve as Senior Advisor to Chairman Gary Gensler, according to the SEC’s Aug. 25 announcement. Her focus will be on issues relating to retail investor protection, including matters relating to policy, broker-dealer oversight, investment adviser oversight and examinations.
“Barb is a champion for investors and will provide invaluable counsel on behalf of the American public,” Gensler said in a statement. “I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with her on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the critical market reforms of the Dodd-Frank Act, and I’m thrilled to collaborate with her again at the SEC.”
“I’m excited to join the SEC and Chair Gensler’s leadership team,” said Roper. “I’ve dedicated my career to ensuring that our capital markets work for the average investor. With investor protection at the core of the SEC’s mission, I’m looking forward to bringing that same focus on the needs of individual investors to my work for the SEC.”
During her 35 years at the CFA, Roper has been an outspoken consumer advocate for investor protection issues, particularly with respect to investment advice standards. She also has conducted studies of the financial planning industry, state oversight of investment advisers, and state and federal financial planning regulation.
Roper has been critical of the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest, as well as the then-proposed prohibited transaction exemption for investment advice under the Trump-led Department of Labor. In testimony last year before the Department of Labor, Roper was critical of the substance and timing of the proposal. “The Department was wrong, in our view, to reinstate the five-part test, which it had previously found enabled firms to evade their fiduciary obligations in circumstances where they are clearly functioning in advice fiduciaries and are being reasonably relied on as advice fiduciaries by retirement savers,” Roper testified.
Similarly, she noted that since the DOL issued its proposal one day before the SEC’s Reg BI was due to take effect, and the comment period closed when that new rule had been in effect for just over a month, “…there hasn’t been time for us—or the Department—to comprehensively study whether, or to what extent, Reg BI has caused firms to change the way they do business,” she testified. Roper further suggested that, based on a preliminary review, even the best of the disclosures that firms provide under Reg BI are “likely to be of little value to the typical financially unsophisticated retirement saver.”
The SEC’s announcement notes that she has conducted studies on the need for audit reform, the need for mutual fund reform, information preferences of mutual fund shareholders, and supposed securities law weaknesses as a cause of the financial crisis.
Photo: Consumer Federation of America
