(HedgeCo.Net) The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued an order filing and settling charges against Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated (Merrill Lynch), a registered futures commission merchant, for failing to promptly produce to the CFTC certain required records and, separately, failing to supervise its employees and agents to ensure that they fulfilled the firm\u2019s statutory and regulatory obligations to keep and promptly produce such records.<\/p>\n
The order finds that for nearly three years, Merrill Lynch failed to produce reliable audit trail data requested by the Division of Enforcement. According to the order, these failures substantially delayed a CFTC investigation and were attributable in large part to Merrill Lynch\u2019s failure to develop and diligently administer adequate procedures for responding to routine regulatory requests \u2014\u00ad for example, Merrill Lynch did not have a process in place to locate account numbers or order entry operator identification numbers; instead, operations personnel simply worked from memory when searching for the data.<\/p>\n
In addition to imposing a $300,000 civil monetary penalty, the order notes that Merrill Lynch has already taken steps to revise its internal process for responding to regulatory data requests, including, but not limited to, designating personnel to: (1) interpret regulatory data requests, the source of the information, and the timing for the response; (2) locate and provide the data; and (3) independently assess the data extraction process and results. <\/p>\n
\u201cAs this case shows, the CFTC will hold registrants accountable for their regulatory obligations,\u201d said James McDonald, director of the CFTC\u2019s Division of Enforcement. \u201cRecordkeeping requirements are important for regulatory and enforcement purposes, and the failure to produce reliable audit trail data here impeded a CFTC investigation.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(HedgeCo.Net) The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has issued an order filing and settling charges against Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated (Merrill Lynch), a registered futures commission merchant, for failing to promptly produce to the CFTC certain required […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,3,16048],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hedgeco-networks-press-releases","category-hedgeco-news","category-hedgecovest-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70905,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70904\/revisions\/70905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}