2015
Texas Securities Commissioner John Morgan entered a Consent Order Aug. 18 which found that Citigroup Global Markets Inc. failed to monitor the registration status of sales assistants, some of whom accepted client orders without being appropriately licensed.
Citigroup was reprimanded and ordered to pay a $35,000 fine to the State of Texas General Fund.
Texas was part of a multi-state investigation into the practices of Citigroup Global and other firms in supervising sales assistants, who provide administrative and operational duties for the company’s broker-dealer agents. Sales assistants who were registered with Citigroup could accept unsolicited orders from clients, but only from states where the sales assistant was registered. The order said that in certain instances, sales assistants accepted unsolicited orders without being properly registered.
The order requires Citigroup to establish and maintain policies, procedures, and systems to adequately ensure that sales assistants can only accept client orders from jurisdictions where they are registered.