In
a 1,700-mile cross-country move designed to gain a bigger voice for CFP
licensees in policy and lawmaking decisions in the nation's capital,
the CFP Board of Standards will move its headquarters from Denver to
Washington, D.C., by the end of the year.
"We're recognizing
that if we're going to accomplish our mission to make sure the public
gets ethical, competent advice, we have to be where that policy is
being shaped and sit in on those conversations," CFP Board of Directors
Chair Karen P. Schaeffer says.
The move is
especially key as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
undertakes its overhaul of Investment Advisors Act regulation, she
says. Schaeffer declines to specify the cost of the move, but says it
will impact the CFP Board's 40 current employees, who will have the
opportunity to reapply for their jobs. Those who decide not to make the
move or who aren't hired will get "generous severance and job
counseling," adds Schaeffer, who says that a group of consultants the
CFP Board hired is still working out what staffing competencies are
needed at the new headquarters. Office space has yet to be located.
Schaeffer indicates the motivation to
move this year is more complex than FPA's growing Washington presence
and the success of its five-person government relations office,
especially its recent landmark legal victory forcing the SEC to rescind
its "Merrill Lynch" exemption for brokers offering investment advice.
"That wasn't it so
much, but there have been a lot of developments and it's more and more
clear that financial planning is being done and regulated in so many
different venues in a piecemeal way," she says. "And we're out in
Denver saying, 'Hey, talk to us. We'll facilitate that. We'll steer
that. We know about that.' We didn't have the relevance we would have
liked in many situations where decisions regarding planning have been
key."
Schaeffer says
that the decision was not made recently, but over a number of years.
"I've been on the board five years now, and I think the feeling was
there when I started that the board was missing opportunities in
Washington and had a mission that it wasn't fulfilling as well as it
could."
While the CFP
Board attempted to create a Washington presence by opening an office in
the northern Virginia suburbs back in 2000, the group's controversial
and now-departed CEO, Sarah Teslik, shuttered that office and
terminated its two employees a month before officially beginning her
job in January 2005. Now, a little over two years later, the CFP Board
is ready to move its entire headquarters there.
After a six-month
search for Teslik's replacement, the CFP Board will name its new CEO
"in short order," says the board's outside spokesman, Javier E. David.
As for policy priorities once it moves to Washington, Schaeffer says
the board will work those out in May. "We have to be enlightened
regulators first and foremost, and I think by being in Washington,
D.C., we'll inspire a vision of how to do that," she argues.
Is becoming a true
self-regulatory organization like the National Association of
Securities Dealers in the cards for the group, which oversees 55,000
CFPs in the United States and another 55,000 abroad? "It's not on my
list of priorities right now," says Schaeffer. "Our first mission is to
serve the public. It's hard to have conversations about an SRO when
there are some pieces of the puzzle still coming into place, like the
evolution of planners themselves."