CFP Board to admonish ex-chairman

The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc. is expected to issue a public admonition letter today to Alan Goldfarb regarding allegations that its former chairman failed to describe accurately how he was compensated on the Financial Planning Association's website. Although such a letter is the mildest formal penalty the board can issue to CFP certificants, he has come out swinging. “What I originally perceived to be a fair, impartial and transparent process wasn't actually such,” Mr. Goldfarb wrote in a four-page rebuttal to the charges obtained by InvestmentNews. The case was “nothing more than a misunderstanding on how to report my compensation on the FPA's website,” he wrote. At worst, “it should have been dismissed with a caution,” Mr. Goldfarb said in an interview. “I still don't think I did anything wrong.” Mr. Goldfarb claims he was paid a salary at his former firm, Weaver Wealth Management LLC, which is owned by an accounting firm. But since he had a small, noncompensated equity stake in the accounting firm's broker-dealer and insurance agency, the CFP Board thought that listing his compensation as fee-only and salary on the FPA's website was misleading, he wrote.

'OUT OF PROPORTION'

The case was “blown out of proportion because of my leadership role as chairman of the CFP Board,” Mr. Goldfarb said in a statement. “I expected to be treated impartially, but now believe the CFP Board's management felt backed into a corner,” he said. Mr. Goldfarb said in the interview that he was surprised the board would admonish him. “I felt it was [a] cut-and-dried” case, he said. But the board's disciplinary panel apparently thought his salary had been “tainted” by subsidiaries' commission revenue, he said. Mr. Goldfarb doesn't plan to appeal the case. “If and when we have an an-nouncement related to this matter, we will release the information to the public,” CFP Board spokesman Dan Drummond wrote in an e-mail. Last November, the CFP Board announced its disciplinary proceeding against Mr. Goldfarb, at which time he resigned from the board. He left Weaver Wealth late last year and formed his own firm, Financial Strategies Group LLC. His departure from Weaver Wealth was unrelated to his dispute with the CFP Board, Mr. Goldfarb said.