Editor's Note: To read a response to this blog from the CFP Board chairman, click here. To read additional comments from Evan Simonoff, click here.

Year after year, the CFP Board of Standards manages to expand its reach, grow its revenues and inflame licensees with an amazing degree of reliable predictability. How does it keep doing it?

Some suggest that the board subtly curries favor with CFP Board directors by dangling lavish perks in front of them. Topping the list is a long array of expensive international junkets offered to members of the board’s various international councils and others.

Gaining global adoption of the CFP mark is a legitimate goal for the CFP Board. So is learning about how the personal financial advice business is evolving in other nations. After all, American advisors might be able to learn a lot from their international colleagues.

And if it involves flying around the world in business class and staying at fancy four-star hotels to explore the global condition of the personal financial advice business, the price must be paid. But some former directors are starting to wonder exactly how high that price is and whether the luxurious junkets and other perks color directors’ judgment. It should be noted that not all the international council meetings of the Financial Planning Standards Board involve foreign travel. This week it met in Denver; last year it met in Sydney and Hong Kong.

Some relationships at the CFP Board have bordered on dubious. Several recent CFP Board CEOs reportedly have retained CFP Board chairs as their own financial advisors. Is that a conflict of interest? I don't know. I also don't know who Kevin Keller's advisor is, or if he even has one. I do know that over the years several CFP Board chairs have let it be known that CFP Board CEOs are their clients, though I can't say I've ever seen the engagement agreements.

The doubling of CFP licensees’ fees has dramatically increased the board’s revenues from $12.6 million in 2009 to $26.4 million in 2012. Technically, the board didn't double fees; it added a special fee with licensee support to market the CFP mark. But it seems unlikely they will reduce the fee when the four-year marketing program ends in two years. According to Guidestar, CEO Kevin Keller’s total compensation increased from $448,000 in 2009 to the most recently reported $888,000 in 2012. But Keller isn't the problem, which has existed long before he arrived at the CFP Board. More worrisome is that the board has outlined an enormously expansive agenda while dropping the ball for many of the essential functions it is supposed to perform.

Remember the revisions of ethics class requirements that were supposed to go into effect on April 1? They’ve been delayed. A proposed revision of practice standards has also been aborted for now.

Last year, the CFP Board aroused the ire of many advisors by clumsily entering and then exiting the age-old debate over compensation. At the same time, the SRO placed its board of ethics and examination under staff control. Many complain the group’s staff is increasingly populated with former Finra cowboys who view all CFP licensee activity through a transactional lens and possess no understanding of the financial planning process.

Still, a budget reaching almost $27.3 million in 2012, almost double its take three years before, has fueled the board’s growing ambitions. The CFP Board is toying with various new ventures, from entering the continuing education business, to establishing a research institute, and it reportedly is even considering entry into the publishing business.

Some of these ventures might have merit if the board were performing its basic functions effectively and growing the CFP brand by increasing the number of licensees. But it isn’t. Instead, it is running TV commercials filled with actors playing goofball disc jockeys. These TV commercials would fail to meet the basic standards put forth by other professional organizations such as the American Bar Association, according to one licensee who studied it closely.

But money seems to be no object in the Beltway these days -- and certainly not at the CFP Board. The board recently moved upstairs in its building, taking an 11-year lease with more space and a much better view of the White House, sources said.

That would be acceptable if the number of CFP license applicants were growing, but it isn’t growing very fast. Why does it need more space when the number of exam takers aren’t growing? The shortage of future advisors in an aging profession remains the industry’s most immediate challenge, and on a long-term basis it threatens the CFP Board’s economic viability.

The challenges of an aging population are hardly confined to the financial advisory profession so blaming a global demographic problem on the board would be ludicrous. Fully 25% of the physicians in America are over the age of 55. But with its robust $27 million budget some believe the CFP Board is the best positioned organization to tackle the problem in this business and, while some of its initiatives are designed to address the problem, it could do a lot more in the eyes of some certificants.

Finally, just about every new initiative under consideration at the CFP Board places it in conflict with every other organization. Many question whether that’s the best way to grow the profession.

Today, the CFP Board is chaired by the widely respected Ray Ferrara, and it has other board members with unimpeachable integrity such as Joe Votava. The problem is that for decades the SRO has filled its board with the profession’s best, and they have failed to curb its elephant-in-the-living-room tendency. One can only hope that this crew is different. After all, the lavish junkets began long before either Keller or most current board members were involved with the SRO.

Service on the CFP Board's numerous subsidiary boards typically involves hundreds, if not thousands of hours, all of it volunteered. Unlike volunteering and eventually attaining a lofty position at another association, CFP Board service typically doesn't give an advisor enhanced marketing visibility that can ultimately pay off in terms of increased revenue in their business.

Do board executives feel that generous perks are a just reward for volunteer efforts with little obvious reward? Who knows. Past directors say the perks are often subtle and it takes a while before they suddenly wake up and feel conflicted. The entire saga of the magnetic vortex that drives the most honorable, decent individuals to repeatedly wander astray and commit silly acts possesses all the dimensions of a Greek tragedy—or comedy. Jusk ask former volunteers.

The lawsuit filed by Jeff and Kim Camarda against the board will force it to open itself up to the public as never before. Some former board directors fear it will reveal that the emperor has no clothes. “If the CFP Board were held to the same standard as licensees, it would lose its license,” one ex-director says.

Keller’s salary is only a tiny part of the problem. By the standards of non-profits in the Beltway, others running vastly smaller non-profits make considerably more. For instance, Dallas Salisbury, CEO of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, pulled down more than $1.2 million in 2012 running a non-profit with $3.8 million in revenues.

Outside of Facebook and Silicon Valley, the non-profit universe may be where future fortunes are made. Just look at NYSE chairman Dick Grasso’s $142 million retirement plan or NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s 33 percent raise to $44 million this year.

The problem for the CFP Board is its misplaced priorities and penchant to reflexively expand its empire.