About 14.6% of advisors—roughly 1 in 7—have at least one disclosure on their record. That's 60,879 out of 418,335 advisors in the SEC's database. The number sounds high until you dig into what actually counts as a “disclosure” and how many of them are minor or were dismissed entirely.
What the Numbers Show
Among advisors who have disclosures, most have just one. The median is 1, and the average is 1.8. So the typical advisor with a disclosure isn't carrying a long list of problems—they have a single event on their record, which could be anything from a settled customer complaint to an old tax lien.
That said, the distribution has a long tail. A small number of advisors have 5, 10, or even 20+ disclosures. Those cases are worth examining closely.
What Types of Disclosures Are Most Common?
Customer disputes dominate the data by a wide margin. Here's the full breakdown across all 418,335 advisors:
| Type | Count |
|---|---|
| Customer Dispute | 67,975 |
| Financial | 10,075 |
| Criminal | 8,201 |
| Regulatory | 7,479 |
| Employment Separation After Allegations | 6,568 |
| Judgment/Lien | 6,514 |
Customer disputes make up about 64% of all disclosure events. That's partly because the bar for reporting is low: if a client files a written complaint and the settlement exceeds $2,500, it goes on the record—even if the advisor did nothing wrong and the firm just settled to avoid arbitration costs.
Financial disclosures (bankruptcies, compromises with creditors) and judgment/lien entries are personal financial events. They may say something about financial judgment, but they don't necessarily reflect how someone manages client money.
Does a Disclosure Mean You Should Run?
Not automatically. Context matters more than the raw count.
A single customer dispute from 12 years ago that was denied or settled for a small amount? That's background noise. An advisor with 25 years of experience is statistically more likely to have a complaint simply because they've served more clients over more market cycles. Someone who managed portfolios through the 2008 financial crisis probably fielded complaints regardless of how well they performed.
What should actually concern you:
- Multiple recent complaints: Three customer disputes in the last two years is a different story than one from a decade ago.
- Regulatory actions: An SEC or FINRA sanction means a regulator investigated and found a problem. That's more serious than a client complaint.
- Criminal disclosures: These involve charges or convictions—fraud, theft, forgery. Always read the details.
- Patterns: Similar allegations coming up repeatedly suggests a real issue with how the advisor operates.
On the other hand, a denied complaint (the claim was investigated and rejected) or a small settlement from years ago is often just the cost of doing business in a regulated industry. An advisor with a single settled $5,000 customer dispute from 2011 and a clean record since then is probably fine.
How to Check Your Advisor's Record
You can look up any advisor's disclosure history on TrueAdvisor. We pull disclosure data directly from SEC filings, so you see the same information regulators have. Each advisor's profile shows the number of disclosures and their types.
If you want to go deeper, FINRA's BrokerCheck (brokercheck.finra.org) has the full text of individual disclosure events for broker-dealers, including complaint details, settlement amounts, and the advisor's own statement about what happened.
The simplest approach: search for your advisor, check if they have disclosures, and if they do, read the details before deciding whether it's a dealbreaker. For most people, filtering to advisors with no disclosures is a reasonable starting point—but it also means excluding 1 in 7 advisors, including many who are perfectly competent.
Data source: Disclosure counts are from SEC Form ADV filings covering 418,335 registered advisors at 41,600+ firms. No advisor can pay to hide or remove their disclosures on TrueAdvisor.