In honor of the Olympics, I did a Yahoo! search of "Olympics + fiduciary". One good result came from Fiduciary Trust Company, which looked at the growth in China demonstrated by the $40 billion spent on construction and infrastructure since being awarded the Olympics. The article then explains how they use diversified asset allocation across multiple countries when trying to take advantage of a fast-growing yet highly-volatile market like China.
Another interesting article came from Calvert in the area of socially-responsible investing, specifically addressing what corporate sponsors of the Olympics can do to address human rights concerns in China and still take advantage of the global marketing opportunity.
Unfortunately, most hits had more to do with an Olympics advertisement on the page instead of a real tie between a fiduciary topic and the Olympics. Anyways, here are the rest of the good links for the week:
- The Investment Fiduciary Leadership Council, a group of CEFEX-Certified organizations, has formed a plan sponsor task force to "evaluate the implications of pending changes in the Department of Labor's fee disclosure and conflicts of interest rules."
- The SEC CCOutreach Program released a Compliance Alert regarding issues that had been coming up recently during their reviews of fund and adviser companies, including personal trading by advisory staff, proxy voting, valuation and liquidity issues, soft dollars, "free lunch" seminars, broker-dealer relationships with insurance companies, and more. The program is a useful tool for compliance departments and offers a number of links to resources for compliance officers. They also offer compliance seminars that are good for CPA continuing education credit. We also would accept attendance at one of these seminars as part of your AIF or AIFA designation continuing education requirements.
- The Government Accountability Office released a report about the challenges 401(k) sponsors have fulfilling their fiduciary duties. The electronic version is not yet available, but you can actually have the report sent to you just by requesting it. Plansponsor.com has a good article summarizing the findings. Most important of the findings was that many sponsors do not fully understand their duties or are not fully aware of which duties actually have been delegated to service providers. Our advice would be to go through our online SAFE and make sure you are either personally fulfilling the duties in each question, or know exactly who is. Any "no" or "I don't know" answer to the questions in the self-assessment basically represent a failure to fulfill all of your fiduciary duties (with the exception of possible non-applicable situations).
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