In another sign that our industry is trying to clean up its image the Massachusetts Security Division is trying to clarify all the designations that are used by Brokers, Investment Advisors and Financial Planners. In this article Robert F. Keane writes about the efforts of the state of Massachusetts to try and clean this problem up. The FPA jumped on board writing a letter to offer some possible criteria for selection of designations.

You can read the background of this action here. I am glad these types of actions are happening, but it saddens me that it’s necessary at all. I guess that it’s normal that whenever there is money involved there will be people out there trying to deceive and steal.

Back in 1993 I had just finished the insurance portion in my studies for the CHFC and passed the test without a problem, so I took the next step and applied for my state insurance license. While waiting for the test to start, many people were telling me how difficult it was, some of them had taken and failed the test three times. I was feeling a bit nervous.

I finished the test in about 20 minutes and aced it, it was not difficult at all. While waiting around for my ride, I was talking with several people who failed the test. I figured these people needed to prepare a little better the test. After all, their careers as Financial Planners were just starting and they needed to be on top of these things if they were going to be successful Financial Planners.

I was really naive, I actually thought most of those people were trying to become Financial planners. I knew that many penny-stock brokers were thieves but I sort of assumed that insurance was not the place for thieves, after all its a big ticket item that people really reflect on prior to purchasing. Naturally, I learned that my assumptions were wrong and that there are actually people that effectively steal money from people my grand-parents age.

Our government needs to get on board with this and move quickly to save people from these crooks.

As part of a settlement with the Division and in addition to other relief, the entities agreed to no longer grant the designation “CEPS” in Massachusetts.

This type of action is simply not strong enough, its obvious that the actions taken were intentionally misleading. Someone should be in jail and a company out of business. But for some reason our governement does not seem to take strong actions against “white collar criminals”. As professionals in our industry we should be pushing the government harder to really punish these people, don’t just give them an opportunity to change how they steal, deny them the opportunity to steal at all.