Outsourced Compliance Services for RIAs

As you are already aware, Stark & Stark has assisted countless investment advisers throughout the country with regulatory, legal, and compliance matters over the past thirty plus years.

We have assisted our clients with registration issues, preparing policies and procedures, interpreting and advising on new rules and regulations, avoiding and defending litigation, and serving as counselors. We look forward to continuing to be able to serve our clients in this manner for countless more years to come.

Historically, we had been reluctant to provide outsourced compliance services for several reasons, but chief among them was our belief that an investment adviser must own its compliance program. We have received numerous inquiries over approximately the last five years from clients and prospective clients to see if we could assist them with carrying out certain routine and required elements of their compliance program.

After continued discussions with these clients, building out the essential infrastructure and hiring the necessary personnel, we began offering these services to a small subset of clients about four years ago.  Since then, many firms have engaged us for these services, and we successfully assisted  several of them to complete  SEC examinations. We are now in a position to make the outsourced compliance services offering available to all of our clients.

We remind firms seeking out our services that there is no one-size fits all program or approach to compliance. We tailor the scope of our services to each client depending upon their specific needs. As such, we will customize our engagement to fit your specific needs and won’t force you to pay for services that are not required or that can easily be performed in-house.

Some of the services that we currently perform for clients include:

• Review and maintain Form ADV;
• Prepare and submit Forms U-4 and U-5;
• Prepare and update policies and procedure manual;
• Conduct email review;
• Determine requirements for and submit state notice filings;
• Prepare and submit Form 13F, 13H and Schedules 13D/G;
• Conduct advertising reviews;
• Assist with performing annual reviews of the firm’s policies and procedures;
• Conduct annual compliance meetings with firm employees;
• Conduct branch office reviews; and
• Engage in monthly compliance calls.

We would be happy to discuss this offering with you to assist with your compliance needs.