The Securities and Exchange Commission is back to looking at the titles that brokers and advisors use to describe their services to investors as part of its best practices regulation, Rick Fleming, head of the SEC’s Office of the Investor Advocate, told attendees at TD Ameritrade’s Advocacy Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., on Friday morning.

The focus is on when a financial professional should be able to call himself or herself an advisor, a title that implies a fiduciary relationship.

While Fleming declined to confirm details of the regulation, he did say that he is working to ensure that the “cure isn’t worse than the disease,” and that regulatory changes don’t water down advisors’ fiduciary rule.

The SEC has taken up the issue of the titles that advisors and brokers present to investors in the past--including the titles of broker, trusted advisor and financial planner--but Fleming says he is confident this effort will be successful and should govern all practitioner verbal and written communications and advertising.

The regulatory path ahead, however, will not be without bumps. For instance, allowing brokers to weave in and out of fiduciary duties continues to be problematic, said Fleming, a former state securities commissioner. “If I’m the client, does it really work if I pick up the phone and call you and you’re my fiduciary while we’re talking and when we hang up you’re not my fiduciary any more?” he said.

“What we have to make sure of is that the rule has to be no less stringent than the [the Investment Advisers Act of 1940]. You have to build in exceptions to accommodate brokers’ business model,” Fleming said. “You have to allow them to sell a limited line of products and proprietary products and fiduciary duty as written doesn’t allow that.”

The path forward for any uniform “best practices” regulation will be far from contentious, former Assistant Secretary of Labor Phyllis Borzi, who crafted the U.S. Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, said at the seminar.

In the midst of lawsuits to water down and block the regulation and the Trump Adminsitration’s request that its impact be studied further, the DOL has filed with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to further delay full implementation of its fiduciary rule until July 2019. The OMB is expected to grant the delay in the next two weeks.

SEC Chairman Jay Clayton has said he wants to take up the gauntlet to create and enforce a uniform best practices standard that would apply to all practitioners and include taxable accounts, something the DOL rule does not do.

“Our goal was always that this would encourage the SEC to supplement or compliment what we were doing,” Borzi said.

“But I, too, have concerns that we might wind up in a much worse place,” Borzi said about the SEC’s plans to move forward with a uniform best practices rule.

In the meantime, the SEC is leveraging existing resources and technology to increase IA exams, whose impact has rose from 10 percent to 15 percent of the industry over the past year, Fleming said.

Currently, advisors see an SEC examiner in their office about once in every 10 years. The agency has been soundly criticized for the low rate even by former SEC staff, who have called the lack of IA exams a disaster waiting to happen.

On the exam front, the agency has reassigned 100 examiners to advisor firms from broker-dealers, Fleming said, adding that the SEC is getting better at taking advantage of technology. “It takes more of the burden off examiners so they can get out and see more people,” he added.

The SEC Investor Advocate echoed Clayton’s sentiments, however, about not using third-party firms to bolster SEC resources. “I have never been a fan of going down the road of third-party advisor exams,” Fleming said. “The low level of exams from RIAs is dangerous and I get that. But I still worry about going down that road and shifting to private firms.”

To become more efficient at leveraging their exam resources, SEC examiners are looking at advisor’s ADV filings each year, using technology to zero in on those they think are higher-risk, Fleming added.