Days after issuing an ultimatum, the CFP Board backed off its demand that well-known planner Rick Kahler meet a Friday deadline to comply with its rules for using the term fee-only or risk an investigation.
The about-face came after Kahler
In what may be a first for the board, it released a joint statement with a potential target of disciplinary action. It said the board and Kahler are continuing ongoing conversations in which the board is providing Mr. Kahler with guidance about how to properly identify his compensation. Until it provides the guidance Mr. Kahler has requested, [the] CFP Board will not take any disciplinary action related to identification of his compensation. Neither board officials or Kahler would comment further.
The move drew criticism from former board officials who say the board has not been consistent in its treatment of CFPs over compensation disclosure issues.
ARBITRARY TREATMENT
Its wrong, its arbitrary, says Tina Florence, a former member of the boards disciplinary and ethics commission who was forced to resign and undergo an investigation before the board sanctioned her and two other officials over a similar issue. They march us out to the woodshed, guns to our head, and they issue a joint statement with Rick, she adds. Board officials declined to reply.
The organizations change of heart on Kahler is the latest installment in an expanding number of battles between the board and different CFPs over use of the term fee-only: the board is defending itself in a
Just last week, the board acknowledged that it allows some planners affiliated with insurance companies that sell commission-generating products to call themselves fee-only, in certain states.
Im happy for Rick, former board Chairman Alan Goldfarb says of the Kahler case, but I think thats definitely unfair.
Goldfarb received the boards
Florence objected to the boards joint statement with Kahler as further evidence of a flawed disciplinary policy at the board. In her previous career, she worked as a policy analyst for the Oregons Adult and Family Services Department. She says she was on a team that helped write a pilot welfare reform law that has since become federal law. We had to do draft rules and go around and have meetings with people in the community and get feedback, says Florence, of the dually registered firm Lane Florence in Folsom, Calif. There is a whole process involved in writing these types of rules and [the board] is not following them.
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