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Which mutual fund providers furnish prospectuses in Spanish?


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Side note:  If a Plan Sponsor with a large Spanish-speaking employee population offers investments that don't have Spanish prospecti, is there a fiduciary breach somewhere?

QKA, QPA, CPC, ERPA

Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left.

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BG5150, I have not seen a court decision with reasoning on your question.

Likewise, I have not seen a court decision finding, or even a complaint asserting, that a fiduciary breached by failing to consider the availability of a prospectus in Spanish as an element of the fiduciary’s evaluation of investment alternatives.

Absent a specific command in a statute, rule, or governing document, whether a fiduciary breached turns on comparing the complained-of fiduciary’s conduct and decision-making to what would have been done using the care, skill, prudence, and diligence that would have been used by one experienced in managing a similar plan.

For now, I’m just seeking to crowd-source a little factual information.

Peter Gulia PC

Fiduciary Guidance Counsel

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

215-732-1552

Peter@FiduciaryGuidanceCounsel.com

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Thank you for pointing us to the other thread.  It mentions a point of law I’ve published on since the early 1990s.

Securities issuers and intermediaries face at least three constraints in explaining an investment using a language beyond English.

1.    Federal securities law prohibits using foreign-language materials unless the issuer also furnishes the complete prospectus in the same foreign language.  Investment Company Act Release No. 6082 (June 23, 1970); American Funds Distributors Inc., SEC Staff No-Action Letter (publicly available Oct. 16, 1989).

2.    If a broker-dealer or its representative allows a presentation to be translated, the broker-dealer “must take steps necessary to ensure that the translation of its presentation is accurate, regardless of whether it or its client [including a plan fiduciary] provides the translator.”  Nat’l Ass’n of Securities Dealers (now Financial Industry Regulatory Authority [FINRA]), Interpretive Letter Applicability of NASD rules to a member’s use of a translator for group retirement plan enrollment presentations (Nov. 26, 2001), available at https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/guidance/interpretive-letters/name-not-public-70.

3.    A securities broker-dealer must not allow its representatives to use a language beyond English unless the broker-dealer has supervisors fluent in that other language.  See FINRA, Disciplinary and Other FINRA Actions (for Apr. 2013), available at https://www.finra.org/sites/default/files/DisciplinaryAction/p241449.pdf; see generally James A. Fanto, Jill I. Gross & Norman S. Poser, Broker-Dealer Law and Regulation, chapter 13 “The Broker-Dealer’s Duty to Supervise” (Wolters Kluwer 5th ed. & Feb. 11, 2020 update).

Those constraints apply to securities issuers and intermediaries.  They might not apply, at least not directly, to an employer/sponsor/administrator not in a securities business.  But the securities-law constraints might practically constrain the services an employer/administrator can get from an investment adviser or securities broker-dealer.

That’s an aspect for why I hope to crowd-source my question: which funds have a prospectus in Spanish?

Peter Gulia PC

Fiduciary Guidance Counsel

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

215-732-1552

Peter@FiduciaryGuidanceCounsel.com

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