SEC exam chief Andrew Bowden said at a January hedge fund conference in New York that the agency's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations will use the "presence exams" that it used to audit newly registered private fund advisors on never-examined advisors in 2015.
"We will use the presence exam process to examine non-private fund advisors that have been registered for more than three years but not yet examined," Bowden told ThinkAdvisor.com through an SEC spokesperson after his comments at the Practising Law Institute's hedge fund compliance conference on Jan. 7.
Included among the SEC's current exam initiatives are: presence exams of newly registered private fund advisors, which started in late 2012 and are near completion; exams of never-been-examined investment advisors, which is "well underway," according to Bowden; and exams of never-been-examined investment companies (or "fund complexes"), as set out in the SEC's 2015 priorities list.
