Here's who's going to be managing your privatized Social Security account

In case you thought you'd get a fairer shake from private brokerage firms that you're getting from the government Social Security program:

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating about a dozen brokerage firms - including Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab and E*Trade Financial - on suspicion that they failed to secure the best available price for stocks they were trading for their customers, according to people who have been briefed on the inquiry.



At issue is the way the companies executed trades of Nasdaq-listed securities when the markets opened in the morning, a period of intense trading activity resulting from the backlog of orders since the market's close the previous day.



After examining trading data from the last four years, the investigation found evidence that trades were often processed in ways that favored the firms over their clients, these people said.



Securing the best price is one of the industry's critical obligations to investors. If the investigators' suspicions are confirmed, these practices are not likely to add up to significant costs for individual investors - the difference would be pennies a share traded - but in total they could represent substantial amounts of money for the brokers.



More important, the investigation opens another possible conflict of interest involving the big firms on Wall Street. In the last few years, the financial industry has been jolted by a series of scandals over practices that rewarded company insiders at the expense of ordinary investors.



Brokers have a "best execution" obligation, defined by common law, fraud provisions of the securities acts and market rules to get the best possible price for investors.



The investigation - the first to look at this aspect of trading - can be expected to put executives and traders on notice that regulators are monitoring best-execution practices and could reignite the debate over how trades should be carried out.



An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment on the inquiry, as did representatives from Ameritrade, Schwab, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and E*Trade, all of whom said their firms did not discuss regulatory investigations. Peter Yandle, a spokesman for NASD, the Nasdaq market's parent company, said he was unaware of the S.E.C. inquiry.

Now, aren't you glad that the Bush Administration is planning to allow you to put a piece of your FICA tax away with these guys?



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