PlainAdvisorCheck publishes a disciplinary profile for every broker-dealer firm registered with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) — built entirely from official FINRA BrokerCheck and SEC enforcement records. This page explains how those pages are produced, what standards they are held to, how the size-normalized safety grade is computed, and how to report a number that looks wrong so we can fix it at the source.

How these pages are produced

Every disclosure count, regulatory-event figure, branch-office count, and safety grade on PlainAdvisorCheck originates in an official public record. We pull firm registration and disclosure data from FINRA BrokerCheck and the SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD) databases, ingest SEC EDGAR litigation releases for the enforcement section, load everything through a documented, version-controlled data pipeline, and render it into firm, state, ranking, and enforcement pages using shared templates. No firm page is hand-written, and no disclosure count is typed in by an editor — each figure you see is read directly from the source record at build time.

Our editorial team is responsible for the parts a pipeline cannot decide on its own: which datasets to use, how each measure is defined and labeled, how the size-normalized grade is derived (see methodology), which guides and explainers we write, and what we will not publish. The pipeline then applies those decisions uniformly across every firm, so the rule that governs one firm page governs all of them.

How the safety grade is derived

The A–F grade is a size-normalized, editorial signal — not a regulatory rating. A firm with no reportable BrokerCheck disclosures earns an A regardless of size. Firms that do carry disclosures are scored by disclosure intensity — a severity-weighted disclosure load (regulatory events weighted most heavily, then arbitrations, then civil events) measured per branch office — and ranked against same-size peers. We grade against peers because FINRA publishes a firm's branch-office count but no firm-wide registered-representative headcount, and because a large national firm naturally accumulates more raw disclosures across more offices. Grading on raw counts alone would penalize scale rather than measure conduct.

Sourcing standards

We publish only data that comes from official public sources, and we name the source on every page. Our data is:

• FINRA BrokerCheck: the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's public database of registered broker-dealer firms and representatives — registration status, branch-office counts, and reportable disclosure events (regulatory actions, arbitrations, and civil judicial events). It is the source for every firm profile and grade on the site.
• SEC IAPD: the Securities and Exchange Commission's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure system, used to corroborate registration and firm identity.
• SEC EDGAR litigation releases: the SEC's public record of enforcement actions and litigation releases, used for the enforcement section.

We do not scrape third-party review sites, we do not republish self-reported ratings as our own, and we do not assign regulatory determinations on top of the public data. Where a figure is derived from the official data (for example, disclosures per branch office or a peer percentile), the page links to our methodology, which sets out exactly how it is calculated.

Accuracy and validation

Because the numbers are read straight from FINRA and SEC files, the most common limitation is the underlying record itself rather than a transcription error. A disclosure is a reported event, not a proven violation — it can range from a settled customer dispute to a formal regulatory sanction — and disclosures may lag the underlying event by weeks while FINRA processes them. Our pipeline applies systematic checks before a value is published: it counts only disclosures the source actually reports (never inferring events), shows a value as unavailable when the source omits it, and reconciles firm, state, and national rollups so the same figure is consistent wherever it appears.

When we find that a displayed number is wrong, we fix the cause, not the symptom. We trace the value back to the data layer, correct the derivation or labeling rule there, and regenerate the affected pages, so the same class of error is resolved everywhere at once rather than patched on a single page.

Editorial independence

PlainAdvisorCheck does not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any firm, broker-dealer, or organization in exchange for how it is presented, graded, or ranked. We do not remove or soften a disclosure record on request. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising. Advertisers have no influence over which firms we cover, how a disclosure is reported, what grade a firm receives, or how any page ranks.

Update schedule

FINRA updates BrokerCheck on a rolling basis and the SEC adds litigation releases as they are published. We refresh our database from the latest official exports and re-stamp the affected pages so the published date reflects when the data genuinely changed. Newly reported disclosures can take 30 to 90 days to appear publicly on BrokerCheck after the underlying event, so a firm's figures reflect what the source has published, not events still in processing.

Corrections process

If a figure looks wrong, please tell us. We treat data-error reports as a priority and follow the same process every time:

1. Report. Email hello@plainadvisorcheck.com with the page URL and the figure you are questioning.
2. Verify. We check the value against the official FINRA BrokerCheck or SEC record for that firm, using its CRD number.
3. Fix at the source. If the figure is wrong on our side, we correct the underlying data or derivation rule and regenerate every page it affects.
4. Note it. If the figure is correct but reflects a known limitation — a recent event not yet posted, or a disclosure that was later resolved — we explain the caveat rather than silently changing it.

Some apparent errors trace back to the FINRA record itself. When that is the case, we will tell you so and point you to the official FINRA BrokerCheck tool so you can verify it directly.

Contact

Questions about our standards, methodology, or a specific figure are welcome at hello@plainadvisorcheck.com. For more on what the data covers and how it is processed, see our About page and methodology. For how to use this information responsibly when choosing or assessing a financial advisor, see our disclaimer.