LPL Financial's campus in San Diego, California.
LPL Financial has been ordered to pay a $6.5 million fine over a litany of supervisory failures that led to flawed background checks and the deletion of more than 1 million customer records from 2014 to 2019, among other snafus, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
In a letter of acceptance, waiver and consent signed by LPL on Wednesday and accepted by FINRA Thursday, the firm agreed to the fine and a censure.
In a statement provided to ThinkAdvisor on Monday, LPL said: "We take our compliance obligations seriously, and have been proactive in identifying, reporting and remediating these issues. We've made significant investments to strengthen our capabilities related to this important work."
Client Records
From January 2014 to September 2019, LPL "failed to establish and maintain a supervisory system, including written procedures, reasonably designed to achieve compliance with certain of its record retention obligations," violating NASD Rule 3010 and FINRA Rules 3110 and 2010, FINRA claimed.
As a result, LPL failed to "retain electronic records in the required format, preserve certain electronic records, and notify FINRA prior to employing electronic storage media," in violation of the Exchange Act and FINRA Rules 4511 and 2010, FINRA alleged.
"The firm's failure affected at least 87 million records and led to the permanent deletion of over 1.5 million customer communications maintained by a third-party data vendor," FINRA alleged.
LPL also "failed to send account notices that are required to be sent to customers at 36-month intervals for each account in which a suitability determination had been made" to more than 1 million clients, in violation of the Exchange Act and FINRA Rules 4511 and 2010, according to FINRA.
