An arbitration panel has granted a former Merrill Lynch junior broker’s request to clear her record of a client complaint after they found “credible” her claim that she had merely been providing administrative support for a senior advisor.
Amber Stoll, who left Merrill last year for Cetera Investment Services in Overland Park, Kansas, filed to clear her record in January. The complaint, which settled for $675,000 of the $1 million in requested damages, was tied to a rollover recommendation.
The customer claimed that the broker failed to act in his best interest in an August 2021 recommendation related to the liquidation of a pension plan, according to Stoll’s BrokerCheck record, which has no other disclosures over her eight-year career.
Stoll told a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority panel of three public arbitrators that she had joined Merrill’s training program in September 2020 and due to Covid-19 restrictions worked remotely for almost a year. During that time, she “relied heavily” on the guidance and supervision of an unidentified “senior financial advisor.”
The dispute centered on a withdrawal form used to initiate a rollover of the customer’s 457 deferred-compensation plan, which was administered by the same government agency as his pension.
Stoll said she completed and emailed the form at the senior advisor’s discretion after he discussed the customer’s retirement benefits on a June 2021 telephone call. She had confirmed with him that it was the right form because Covid-related restrictions had blocked the agency from accepting calls to initiate rollovers, according to the award’s recounting of her petition.
The form, which has since been updated to warn against using it for 457 transactions, did not indicate that it would affect the pension, Stoll said.
Stoll said she received no confirmation of the transaction’s outcome and learned that the pension had been liquidated during a review meeting in early 2024.
Stoll’s lawyer, Derek C. Anderson of Winget, Spadafora & Schwartzberg in Boulder, Colorado, did not respond immediately to a request for comment. Neither did a Merrill spokesperson.
Stoll first registered with Edward D. Jones & Co. in 2018 before moving two years later to Merrill.
Like this article? Let AdvisorHub come to you! Sign up