FINRA Arbitration: How One Advisor’s Fight Cleared His Record of an Old Annuity Claim

On September 18, 2025, a veteran financial advisor from Columbia, South Carolina, achieved a significant victory, winning a FINRA expungement to remove an unwarranted entry from his public BrokerCheck and CRD records. This landmark case, guided by the legal expertise of HLBS Law, serves as a powerful testament to the process for erasing outdated and baseless customer disputes that can unfairly tarnish a financial professional's reputation.

Is it possible to remove an old, dismissed complaint from a financial advisor’s public record? The answer, as this case clearly demonstrates, is yes. The advisor, with a distinguished career spanning nearly 20 years, faced a single blemish on his record—a 2011 client complaint. The client had alleged that the advisor made unapproved changes to her variable annuity holdings. However, the firm, Northwestern Mutual Investment Services, LLC, had investigated and denied the claim without any admission of fault or monetary exchange.

The Case: Baseless Annuity Allegations and a Stained Record

The dispute originated in late 2010 when the advisor took on a new client to help her transition an aggressive investment portfolio to a more conservative strategy. Her primary goals were income generation and reduced risk, a priority heightened by her husband's terminal illness. After detailed discussions and a review of her financial profile, the client verbally authorized the advisor to liquidate her variable annuity and temporarily move the funds to low-risk money market accounts, in preparation for a fixed annuity purchase.

Despite this explicit authorization, the client filed a formal complaint in May 2011, alleging unauthorized reallocations. A thorough internal investigation by Northwestern Mutual found no evidence to support the claim, and it was officially denied in July 2011. Even though the dispute was dismissed by the firm, it remained as a permanent mark on the advisor’s public record, creating a misleading impression for future clients.

To restore his unblemished professional profile, the advisor, represented by attorney William R. Bean, presented his case for expungement to a three-arbitrator FINRA Panel in 2025. The panel meticulously reviewed the facts and found the advisor's case to be overwhelmingly compelling.

The panel's unanimous decision recommended expungement under FINRA Rule 13805. In their official rationale, the arbitrators explicitly stated that the allegation was “factually impossible or clearly erroneous” and “false.” The panel’s written findings emphasized that the client had “explicitly authorized the liquidation of her variable annuity” and that the firm’s own investigation had found “no evidence of unauthorized trading whatsoever.”

Ultimately, the panel concluded that the claim had “no public protection value” and ordered the complete deletion of all associated disclosure pages from the advisor's record. This decisive victory not only cleared the advisor’s name but also restored his unblemished professional integrity, setting a precedent for others in similar situations.