Can ethics be “unbundled” from business?

Imagine the following: You need to hire a lawyer to advise you on a complex and highly confidential corporate acquisition, but the one you’d most like to have is pretty pricey. You explain this to her and she proposes what she calls a “win-win” solution:  if you sign an engagement letter that broadly states that she need not act in your best interests while performing services for you she’ll discount her hourly rate by 25%.

Or, imagine that your doctor has two schedules of fees: a “full price” one for patients who want the doctor to prescribe medicine based purely on what’s in their best interests and a lower-cost “value plan” for those who agree that the doctor can receive money from pharma companies for prescribing their medicines. Like the lawyer, your doctor is offering to “unbundle” his professional ethical obligations from the other aspects of his service – as a way of saving you money.

You seek clarification from both of them – what will this mean for me?  They both have the same response: while we won’t promise to act in your best interest we will act in ways that are “suitable” for you.

Would you be tempted by either offer?

Note that it is doubtful that either arrangement would be considered lawful – certainly the medical one  wouldn’t be, and I doubt the lawyer one would be either (although professional ethics issues arising from providing unbundled legal services are somewhat complicated – as reflected in this piece in the ABA Journal).    But even if they were permissible it is hard to imagine clients and patients saying yes to such options, where the risk of betrayal is so clear-cut and the adverse impact of such could be so great.

Yet a less obvious but not at all hypothetical version of ethics unbundled from business is already standard operating procedure in large parts of the investment world, where some of those who give advice to investors about retirement accounts have been allowed to operate outside of a best-interests-of-the-client framework. The main argument for this state of affairs is that “Consumers Deserve Choices”,  as described in this recent article in Investment News – including the choice of low-cost/non-fiduciary advice.

Of course, not all business relationships warrant the imposition of fiduciary duties. With some, “the morals of the marketplace” – in the immortal words of Judge Benjamin Cardozo – may well be morality enough.  But the business of providing advice about retirement accounts would not seem to be in this category, given how much is at stake for retirees (and, in a sense, for society as a whole), and the massive conflicts of interest problems that have beset the financial services industry for decades.

However, change is in the air. As described by the director of policy research at Morningstar,  last week “the Department of Labor proposed an amendment to the fiduciary definition under ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. In short, the proposal would require any individual receiving compensation for providing investment advice to a plan sponsor, plan participant, or IRA owner making a retirement investment decision to adhere to a series of fiduciary duties–that is, to act in the best interests of their clients. The rule is based, in part, on a Council of Economic Advisors analysis showing that when individuals receive what the White House calls ‘conflicted advice,’ they tend to enjoy lower investment returns.”

Note that the even the proposed rule does have some exceptions built into it. For instance, “you can call a broker to execute a trade without triggering fiduciary duties, you just can’t ask for advice,…” as noted in this article in Forbes.   There are other exceptions too.  But overall it is a big step forward.

At this risk of being repetitive, I definitely recognize that there are times when it may indeed make sense to “unbundle” what would otherwise be an ethical duty from a business relationship.  An example from an earlier post is that joint ventures partners may and sometimes do waive fiduciary duties expected of board members on the JV.

However, one would be hard-pressed to look at instances such as this – where the investors in question tend to be powerful and sophisticated – as being relevant to the reality faced by most individuals struggling to grow/maintain their retirement accounts. Like the lawyer and doctor examples at the beginning of the post, if you take ethics out of the equation for investment advice involving retirement, what’s left might well be worthless …or outright damaging.