SEC Getting More Aggressive With Advisor Exams, Ex-Directors Say

"I spent 20 years [at the SEC], and depending on what the political environment was, there would be that swing in the ability and the aggressiveness of the exam program, depending on who's in the chair's seat," Driscoll said. "Right now, it's pretty evident there's an aggressive chair — that filters down, not directly to examiners … but I think that there's less concern of the ideas and approaches they [the examiners] take. That's resulted in larger periods of time and more documents."

Onsite Exams

The SEC is returning to onsite exams, Driscoll said. "Not a lot of them, but they are starting to come back."

Natasha Vij Greiner, the SEC's deputy director and national associate director of the Investment Adviser/Investment Company Examination Program, said Tuesday at the IAA event that "we're going to start conducting more onsite exams over the next couple months."

Said Greiner: "Having the interaction with registrants is really critical, so going forward you're going to see us request to come back onsite but also willing to coordinate — we know the world has changed a bit … we're not past the remote work environment" so some of the exams will be offsite.

"It will ebb and flow and taking a hybrid approach is not a bad way to go moving forward," Greiner said.