Comment Text:
New CFTC Form 102A requires Reporting Firms to submit Special Account information, including trading account (aka Related Account) owner details. Required fields include account number, account class (C/H), and multiple fields to identify the account owner(s): entity type (NP or LE), owner name, address (street, suite, city, state, country code, postal code), NFA ID, LEI, website, phone number, and e-mail address; and, in the case of legal entities, the natural person contact's name, phone number, e-mail address, employer name, and job title.
New CFTC Form 40 requires a different reporting party - the trader that was reported on the Form 102A - to submit much of the same data for Related Account owners, on a separate form. (Today, Form 102A can be submitted either on the CFTC portal, or via secure FTP; however, today the Form 40 can only be submitted by manually entering the information on the CFTC portal.)
Regardless of delivery mechanism, though, these two forms require two different reporting parties to maintain essentially the exact same information about Related Account owners, so that the forms can be submitted separately. The duplication of effort is both extremely time-consuming, and costly. For example, a Commodity Trading Advisor with multiple hundreds, even thousands, of accounts, would need to submit Related Account owner information on a Form 40, when an FCM Reporting Firm had already submitted that information on a Form 102A.
The 102A submission process is relatively mature, with Reporting Firms having spent several years getting forms ready for ongoing submissions. As noted above, these forms contain all the Related Account owner information required, and these forms have virtually all already passed CFTC xml schema validation routines and data edits.
The Form 40 submissions, on the other hand, are relatively new, and this would require a whole new group of reporting entities (the traders) to get to the same place: with all the Related Account owner information populated in a database for submission, in a format that can pass the same schema validation routines and data edits.
It would be better if the Form 40 submissions were limited to specific trader information, and if CFTC relied on the Related Account owner information that was already submitted successfully. CFTC already has, in house, all the Related Account owner information; they can retrieve that from the 102A forms for any special account that submits a Form 40.
This would substantially reduce time, cost and duplication of efforts among these reporting parties.
