Department of Labor staffers offered no hints of coming changes in the fiduciary rule during the four-day hearing on the proposal, Institute for the Fiduciary Standard Kate McBride said at its end Thursday.
McBride was one of the few who attended the entire meeting.
On Wednesday, DOL Employee Benefits Security Administration Deputy Assistant Secretary Tim Hauser said operational alternations would be made to the rule before it was finalized, but he did not give specifics. Labor Department Secretary Tom Perez has also said changes are in the offing.
On the last day of the hearing, Hauser challenged the financial services industry charges that there are not enough exemptions from the proposed fiduciary rule for advisors and others who are providing education information to retirement plan participants as opposed to selling them products, such as mutual funds.
“[Education exemptions] are the longest section of the fiduciary rule,” the DOL executive said.
Hauser took aim at another financial industry complaint that the rule should only be done jointly with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to impose a fiduciary duty on all financial advice to retail customers.
“If we impose different standard than SEC, you're claiming it would be unworkable,” he testily told one financial CEO.
He assured another CEO that brokers and advisors would not have to memorize thousands of pages to learn how to obey the rule.
On one of the final issues he discussed, Hauser told an American Benefits Council executive plan sponsor that call center workers would not be subject to a fiduciary duty for casual conversations with plan participants.
At the end, Hauser called the hearings enormously helpful and informative and they would make a difference.
But with thousands of pages of comments filed on the rules weeks in advance of the hearing, little new ground was broken.
The basic framework of the two sides in the fiduciary debate is this:
Advocates say the fiduciary rule would help investors because it would lower fees and often prevent them from losing money from being steered into bad investments by advisors eager to maximize their sales fees.
Opponents say the fiduciary rule would harm investors by making it too expensive for companies to offer advice to consumers with few retirement funds, keeping them away from the asset building opportunities advisors can provide.
No date has been set to finalize the rule, although Perez said he wants it to happen before President Obama leaves office in January 2017.