An insurance agent who falsified her continuing education credits has had her licence renewal rejected by the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) in Ontario.
The regulator issued an order refusing to issue a licence to former agent Sandy Leigh Ulrich following a decision by the Financial Services Tribunal in April which ordered the FSRA to refuse to renew her authorisation, finding she was unsuitable for the role.
The ruling comes after the regulator accused Ulrich of purchasing fraudulent continuing education (CE) certificates and providing them to the FSRA as proof of completion of required CE.
In a regulatory notice, FSRA alleged that Ulrich paid $100 in 2016 for five certificates falsely attesting that she had completed 30 hours of required continuing education, including courses on financial planning, estate planning, earmarked funds, consumer needs analysis and universal life insurance.
In 2017, her licence was renewed based on this alleged fraud, but when she applied for a second renewal in 2019, the regulator issued a notice proposing to revoke her licence.
According to the tribunal’s decision, the forged CE certificates were supplied by Michael Rutledge, a former legitimate teacher of insurance-related courses who “resigned from teaching in 2004 and, from approximately 2007 to 2017, supplied forged (CE) points to a number of licensed insurance agents,” the tribunal found.
In 2019, Rutledge and the regulator reached a settlement that imposed a 10-year ban on him from the insurance industry and required him to cooperate with enforcement actions against life insurance agents who obtained fraudulent CE certificates from him.
According to the tribunal’s decision in the case, Ulrich claimed that she had completed online courses provided by Rutledge to earn credits and that she had borrowed several textbooks from him.
However, the tribunal noted that “no evidence of this was presented at the hearing.”
Ultimately, the court found that “Ulrich provided the Financial Services Commission of Ontario, the previous regulatory body, with false credit information (CE) and false information in 2017” and ordered the FSRA to deny her life insurance licence renewal.
The court also found her unfit to work in the insurance industry because she had not completed CE training and had made a material misrepresentation regarding that on her renewal application, and because she had “demonstrated a lack of trustworthiness.”
