Falsely witnessing signature - It's a wrongdoing!

A common shortcut by financial advisors is to sign as a witness when they did not see the investor/insured sign the document.  

For someone trying to justify their breach of the rules, it asserted that truthfully attesting to witnessing a signature by their client is said to be a technical step.  The financial advisor often says that this was "for the convenience of the client."  But excuses aside, and they are just after the fact excuses, this is a serious breach of an advisor's duties.  

Why?  

1. Because the act of witness is part of proving that the signature is actually that of the client.  This is becoming even more important with the indiscriminate and unthinking use of electronic signatures like Docusign.

2. Furthermore, the witnessing of a signature is often the only alleged evidence of the financial advisor performing other mandatory steps.  Such as providing mandatory explanations and obtaining informed instructions.

3. This destroys the financial advisor's credibility.

4. It undermines the compliance process that protects life insureds and investors.

When an advisor falsely attests to witnessing a document, the advisor's evidence is severely undermined.  If the advisor so easily lied once, and then tries to justify or excuse the breach (ex. it only happened once), then the entirety of the advisor's evidence is undermined.  The question becomes: why can anything the advisor says under oath be believed?  

How common is this?  It appears in most of the life insurance files we review and more than 50% of the securities files.  

What should shock regulators is how easy it is to establish these breaches from a basic review of the financial advisor's records. So why are insurers and securities dealers (who are responsible for oversight and compliance) auditing their financial advisors for these serious breaches and reporting the breaches to the regulator?  When someone is paid by sales, not doing the right thing, then this is an incentive to breaching oversight and compliance.  

It's time4change.See: https://decisions.cisro-ocra.com/ins/qccsf/fr/item/521171/index.do

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