The investment advisor and broker-dealer industries are plagued with too many repeat-offender “scoundrels” and “cockroaches,” SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher said Friday.

“It is in all our interests to purge them from the markets,” the Republican member of the Securities and Exchange Commission told the 46th annual Rocky Mountain Securities Conference in Denver. “Despite our best efforts, they manage to stay in the industry and continue to wreak havoc on the investing public.”

Gallagher noted that 20 percent of the more than 600,000 actively licensed registered representatives in Finra’s BrokerCheck database have one to five disclosures for items such as customer complaints, regulatory violations, terminations, bankruptcy, judgments and liens.

But he said there is a public misperception that broker-dealers have more bad actors than advisory businesses.

“There are plenty of repeat offenders at investment advisory firms who are engaging in misconduct. We’re just not finding them as quickly because the SEC allocates a disproportionate amount of resources to policing the activities of broker-dealers when compared to those we expend policing investment advisors,” Gallagher said.

He said he is against the SEC quickly imposing a fiduciary duty on broker-dealers because it is based on a false premise that brokers represent a greater threat to retail investors than investment advisors.

Having investment advisors examined by a self-regulatory organization (SRO) could be a way to gain more information on the actual amount of investment advisor misconduct, he said. However, Richard Ketchum, chairman and chief executive of Finra, the SRO some feel is most suitable for the task, said in April that Finra is no longer seeking to take on the responsibility of investment advisor oversight.