The House of Representatives doesn't have plans to consider legislation allowing fees to be used to increase the number of investment advisor exams by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the House Financial Services Committee’s top press aide Jeff Emerson told Financial Advisor magazine Tuesday.

After a Financial Advisor reporter was directed by Committee Chairman Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling to his press office to get his stance on the issue, Emerson said he has never heard Hensarling say that he thinks the SEC should examine more advisors.

By contrast the leading Democrat on the committee, California’s Maxine Waters, and the last three SEC chairmen have said increasing the number of registered investment advisor exams beyond the current 9 percent a year is one of the most glaring investor protection gaps for the commission.

Current SEC Chairman Mary Jo White told the House committee more money is needed to increase the number of exams because the number of examiners per trillion dollars of advisor assets under management has declined in a decade from 19 to eight.

“It hits you between the eyes,” White said. The agency oversees 11,000 advisors.

Like last year, the SEC is asking Congress for an additional 240 examiners to oversee investment advisors. But as in 2013, the chances of getting the money from the Republican-controlled House are minimal.

White said at the session that the lure of less stringent regulation is helping to propel the transformation of broker-dealers into investment advisors.

“We are not there as much and the industry knows that,” she said.

During the hearing, the SEC chairman said areas of concentration for the agency’s new, focused reviews of never-examined advisors will include deep dives into compliance programs, portfolio management and safety of client assets.

She told the panel that risk-based exams of advisors last year led to several enforcement actions aimed at being proactive to minimize investor losses.

In 2013, multiple enforcement actions also came from initiatives to identify investment advisors who lacked effective compliance programs, to detect abnormal performance returns of hedge funds, and to find violations of the custody rule, she noted.

White said common deficiencies found during risk-based exams of private fund advisors who first came under SEC oversight as a result of the Dodd-Frank act include misallocating fees and expenses; charging improper fees to portfolio companies or the funds they manage; disclosing fee monitoring inadequately; and using bogus service providers to charge false fees in order to kick back part of the fee to the advisor.

At last count, approximately 2,400 investment advisors have filed reports with the SEC on 7,000 hedge funds, 66 liquidity funds and 6,000 private equity funds.

The agency is on track to complete its goal of examining 25 percent of private fund advisors by the end of December, according to White. She pointed out many of the investors in these funds are public and private pension funds as well as charities, academic institutions and foundations.

The session was scheduled to be the first public appearance in Congress of Republican New York Rep. Michael Grimm since his criminal indictment for $1 million in tax fraud from a restaurant he owned prior to his election, but he resigned from the committee the night before.