Investment Mess!

OMG. What a mess the last two days have been.

I’m a member of the Profit Sharing here at my company. Back in Dec/05 I got my first payment. That same month, I quickly invested it all into various mutual funds. All three did fairly well. Two better then the others.

I hadn’t touched them since then. I hadn’t even LOGGED into my account with the company that holds them. So much to my surprise I got three letters in the mail yesterday from that company. I open the first one. “We are mailing you to inform you of an action on your account.” All three of them had been SOLD! WTF?!

I immediately go to the person in charge of that at our company and ask what’s going on. He had no idea and said that no one with access to the accounts should have been touching that stuff.

On my drive home, I call up the holding company and start inquiring as to what’s happened with this. They are able to tell me that besides me there are 3 other people who have access to my accounts and can change them!

So here’s the first MAJOR issue… THREE other people! WTF? I understand that they need access to be able to deposit money, but there should be ONE person in charge of this account, not THREE.

I continue talking with them about who could have done this. They tell me that it was done via an online account and that they do not store the username/etc of the person who did the transaction.

Here’ the second major issue.. WHAT? No logs of who performed a transaction. This is ridiculous! If we were to say that in our systems we’d get hit with HUGE fines via HIPAA. They tell me the only way they can get that sort of information is to start a fraud inquiry.

We chat some more and find that not only did this transaction incur a $50 transaction fee. The three funds are UP more then $150 since the date of sale. Which means that I’ve lost out on $200 worth of income from the funds. There’s obviously no way to roll back a transaction, once the sell order is placed, you’ve sold your shares. They won’t rebuy them for me at the sale price because it was an “authorized” transaction. I can’t move the money out of the holding account, because then it becomes taxable income. So basically I’m stuck.

This also raises the question of now do I owe taxes on the capital gains from the sale of these funds? At this point no one is sure. I have to find a good financial adviser to find out! Which will incur more lost money on my account. Plus, I had to spend more transaction fees to reinvest the funds.

The last issue is HOW did this possibly happen? The person who did it says it was an accident and that ALL of the accounts he manages a mixed in with one login, both his personal accounts AND all the accounts of EVERY employee which is in the profit sharing plan. This is a mess! Should I now charge the company for all this lost income? Do I have any recourse against them for letting this happen? UGH!

I reinvested in some of the same funds and chose two additional new ones today. Hopefully they will perform well.

UPDATE:// I’m going to be on the SUZE ORMAN SHOW! Regarding this issue! How fucking exciting is that!!! They call me on Monday to record the call. Not sure when it’ll go on, but I’ll be sure to let you know!!!