FINRA Fines TD Private Client Wealth for Email Review Failures

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has fined TD Private Client Wealth $600,000 for failing to review approximately 3.5 million emails related to 691 employee email accounts.

According to FINRA’s order, from February 2013 through July 2022, TDPCW failed to establish and maintain a supervisory system, including written procedures, reasonably designed to achieve compliance with the firm’s obligation to review correspondence and internal communications.

Accordingly, the firm violated NASD Rule 3010 and FINRA Rules 3110 and 2010.

According to FINRA’s order, during the time period, the firm “often failed to place the email accounts for its new employees into the electronic queue it established for email review,” with approximately 43% of employees not being placed into the review queue within five days of the date that they became associated with the firm.

At least 34 employees were not added for more than one year, the order states, and at least two employees were not added for more than five years.

The firm’s written procedures “failed to set forth the necessary step to add accounts to the review queue, identify the departments or personnel responsible for those steps, or identify any requirements for when the steps should be taken,” according to the order.

Due to the lack of reasonable written procedures, “there were miscommunications between multiple departments about whether the email accounts had been placed into the queue and misunderstandings about which department was responsible for carrying out particular steps required to place an account into the queue,” FINRA said.

As a result, the firm failed to review approximately 3.5 million emails, from 691 employee email accounts, for varying periods of time during the relevant period.