Don’t look for the SEC to follow the Department of Labor’s lead and come up with its own fiduciary rule anytime soon.

Despite reports that the agency plans to issue a fiduciary proposal next spring, that looks unlikely to happen with a new administration and probably a new SEC chair taking over next year, said Skip Schweiss, managing director of advisor advocacy and industry affairs for TD Ameritrade Institutional.

That was the feedback from recent meetings with “well-placed people” in Congress and the SEC, Schweiss told advisors Thursday at TD Ameritrade’s Elite LINC conference in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

The difficulty of crafting a fiduciary standard that encompasses all business models—and the inevitable politics of getting something done—have kept the SEC from acting in the six years since Dodd-Frank authorized the agency to create a standard.

“What you saw the DOL do is tackle that complication and find a way through it,” Schweiss said in an interview.

“So whether the SEC takes a cue from [the DOL rule], uses it as a roadmap, or ignores it, is anyone’s guess,” he said.

Separately, the agency is likely to propose a plan next year to require third-party exams of RIA firms, Schweiss told advisors. What types of auditing firms will qualify to conduct the exams is unknown, but Schweiss anticipates an exam cycle every three to four years.

Schweiss also warned advisors about pending (but little-noticed) anti-money laundering (AML) rules that look set to go into effect sometime next year. The rules will require advisors to report on a range of suspicious and fraudulent transactions.

The conference devoted a separate session to the new AML rules.

Fittingly, the event concluded Thursday with an update on the DOL rule, which continues to be a big topic of discussion among advisors.

Steve Sokolic, an ERISA attorney with the Retirement Law Group in Redondo Beach, Calif., reviewed the new fiduciary mandate and noted several challenges the DOL rule could impose on advisors.

For one thing, advisors handling IRA accounts will be subject to a “reasonable compensation” standard, he said, “but no one knows what reasonable compensation is, really.” It depends on market pricing, the amount of monitoring an investment requires and the complexity of the product.

“Look at the value of your service,” Sokolic said. “It’s very important to talk about all the services you can provide” in order to justify the fees clients pay.

The DOL’s level-fee exemption for fee-based advisors who recommend rollovers “is not as simple as it seems,” Sokolic added, because advisors will have to get data on the retirement plan’s expenses and administrative rules to justify a rollover recommendation.

To comply with the rule, which becomes effective April 10, advisory firms will need to have policies and procedures in place, provide training for advisors, inventory impacted accounts, communicate the changes to clients and determine what exemptions are needed, Sokolic said.