Wealth Advisor Vetting Report

Overview

A Wealth Advisor Vetting Report is a paginated, twelve-section due-diligence document on a financial advisor or RIA. It is generated on demand from FINRA BrokerCheck, SEC IAPD, state-securities-commissioner enforcement records, ADV Part 1A and Part 2A filings, and the advisor’s own enriched profile. It takes three to five minutes to produce, costs 50 credits (about $20 USD), and is delivered as a shareable HTML report with a printable PDF view.

It is intended for an HNW individual choosing a financial advisor, a family office vetting a prospective RIA partner, a broker-dealer M&A team running Due Diligence on advisor practices, or an investigative journalist doing financial-misconduct work.

The report is not a verdict on the advisor. It is a structured presentation of the public regulatory record across four fiduciary-duty axes — regulatory cleanliness, disclosure transparency, customer-complaint history, professional credential strength — for the reader to evaluate themselves against fiduciary standards.

The Five Frameworks We Adopt

FINRA BrokerCheck Data Integrity Standards

FINRA BrokerCheck (brokercheck.finra.org) is the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s public-disclosure database for broker-dealer registered representatives. Every registered rep is required to disclose specific categories of public matters: customer complaints, regulatory actions, civil judgments, criminal disclosures, financial disclosures, termination disclosures. The data integrity standards behind BrokerCheck — what must be disclosed, by whom, when, and in what format — anchor Section 5 (BrokerCheck Disclosure History) of every report.

SEC IAPD (Investment Adviser Public Disclosure)

The SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system (adviserinfo.sec.gov) is the analogous public-disclosure database for SEC- and state-registered investment advisers. ADV Part 1A (firm-level disclosures) and ADV Part 2A (the "narrative ADV" brochure) plus Part 2B (brochure supplement, per-advisor) are the primary public surfaces. Section 10 (Fee Structure & Disclosure) of every report sources from these documents directly.

ICD 203 — Analytic Standards (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Directive 203 defines nine tradecraft standards: properly described sources, proper expression of uncertainty, distinction between intelligence and assumptions, incorporation of alternative analysis, judgement of consequences, customer-relevant focus, logical argumentation, accurate reflection of source content, and clear language. We treat these as binding for every Wealth Advisor Vetting Report.

UK PHIA Probability Yardstick (UK Defence Intelligence)

The Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment publishes a seven-band probability yardstick. Every probabilistic claim in a Wealth Advisor Vetting Report — complaint-rate-vs-peer-median inferences, regulatory-action-pattern projections, AUM-trajectory claims — is expressed using these seven bands paired with an analytical-confidence rating (High / Moderate / Low).

Fiduciary Duty Framework — DOL Fiduciary Rule + State RIA Fiduciary Standards

The U.S. Department of Labor Fiduciary Rule (in its current iteration) plus state-level RIA fiduciary standards define the legal duty of care owed by financial advisors. Section 2 (Fiduciary Suitability Assessment) frames the score against this duty: regulatory cleanliness (have they faced enforcement under the rule?), disclosure transparency (do their ADV disclosures meet the duty’s transparency standard?), customer-complaint history (do complaints suggest the duty was breached?), credential strength (does their training support the duty’s competence requirement?).

The Twelve Sections of a Wealth Advisor Vetting Report

FINRA BrokerCheck + SEC IAPD — How We Use Them

Every BrokerCheck or IAPD reference in a Wealth Advisor Vetting Report cites the specific URL pattern the reader can verify themselves:

• FINRA BrokerCheck individual: https://brokercheck.finra.org/individual/summary/[CRD]
• FINRA BrokerCheck firm: https://brokercheck.finra.org/firm/summary/[CRD]
• SEC IAPD firm: https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/firm/summary/[CRD]
• SEC IAPD individual: https://adviserinfo.sec.gov/individual/summary/[CRD]

The asymmetry between a granted and a denied expungement request is structurally important: granted expungements remove the underlying complaint from BrokerCheck, so the absence of a complaint does not prove there were no complaints. We disclose this honestly in Section 7 (Expungement Request History) and surface DENIED requests where they show up in FINRA arbitration award documents.

Fiduciary Duty Framework

The legal duty owed by an investment adviser to their client depends on the regulatory regime under which they operate:

• RIA-only advisors (registered as Investment Advisers under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 and equivalent state law) owe a continuous fiduciary duty to clients — duty of care + duty of loyalty.
• Broker-dealer registered reps historically operated under a "suitability" standard, which the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI, effective 2020) elevated to a "best interest" standard for retail recommendations.
• Hybrid advisors (dual-registered as both RIA and broker-dealer rep) are subject to BOTH standards depending on which capacity they are acting in for a specific account or recommendation.

Section 2 (Fiduciary Suitability Assessment) scores against these standards. The four sub-scores map to the four fiduciary axes: regulatory cleanliness, disclosure transparency, customer-complaint history, professional credential strength.

Honest Limits — what we do not do

Corrections Policy

Three commitments modeled on the BBC editorial corrections process:

1. Identification window. Errors flagged within thirty days of report generation are corrected on the canonical view URL within five business days.
2. Re-publication, not silent edit. Corrections preserve a redline diff between the original and corrected text, time-stamped, with a one-line explanation.
3. Subject right of reply. The advisor named in any Vetting Report may submit a one-paragraph factual rebuttal to corrections@mentionfox.com. Verifiable rebuttals attach to the report alongside the original section.

Data integrity floor — ALCOA. Every Wealth Advisor Vetting Report carries an ALCOA Methodology footer: each factual claim is Attributable to a cited source, presented in Legible plain language, marked with the date it was Contemporaneously verified, sourced from the Original primary record where available, and Accurately reflects the underlying evidence.