The Investment Dealers Association of Canada has issued a notice explaining the various circumstances in which it will issue a fee refund, primarily due to problems with the conversion over to the National Registration Database.

The notice, dated February 27, says IDA fees will be refunded in all situations in which a fee was incorrectly collected. These are situations where an individual was approved, but was missing from the NRD due to a conversion error; or, approved in a specific jurisdiction but missing from the NRD in that province/territory, due to a conversion error. It also covers individuals approved during the “Freeze Period” from March 3 to March 30, 2003, and firms filing replacement applications, to correct a previous Initial-type application in which the categories of IDA approval were incorrectly completed.

Thee IDA says that, as a result of a bug in the NRD, these submissions cannot be identified as deficiency responses, with the result that full fees are withdrawn by the NRD for the second submission. This function will be corrected in a future release, the IDA notes, so that all submissions can be tagged as Deficiency Responses and not incur extra fees.

Effective immediately, fees will not be refunded on applications withdrawn by a firm. This new policy applies to submissions not yet reviewed by the IDA as well as those received outside of NRD.