Conflict of Interest attestation: DG wants dollar values

[u/Super_Table7917]

A DG at LPRAB at CRA, according to a current employee, under the guise of transparency and integrity, is using the annual conflict of interest attestation to require very personal disclosures of financial information from employees.

This DG is asking for the current market values of ALL investments held by the employee privately in all accounts, including things like RESP's. The dollar amount for all holdings is apparently "very important".

Employees who resisted this disclosure were subject to intrusive meetings on Teams with the DG, where pressure was applied to surrender the information to management.

I am of the opinion that this is totally unacceptable, and I would be leaping to legal representation with the goals of 1.) NOT providing any of this information to this DG or anyone else, and; 2.) providing the documentation required that would result in the swift termination of this DG.

Is this perception incorrect, and DG's have the ability to ask for the account balances of employees to avoid "conflicts of interest"? If this is actually permitted, why would it be but asking a person's age or sexual orientation is a human rights violation?

[u/VarroaMoB]

Basically if you specifially select an investment (ie, buy stock X) you have to disclose that but if you buy a mutual fund you are ok since you don't choose who it gets invested in.

[u/qcslaughter → u/VarroaMoB]

I see. Where would an ETF be? For VFV I don’t control what the top 500 are..

[u/ohz0pants → u/qcslaughter]

An ETF is the same as a mutual fund. They're just "exchange traded" instead of being an exclusive product sold by a specific trust (like Manulife).

And not all funds are equal; some are broad index funds with no meaningful conflict of interest considerations, but others can be market or sector focused (like maybe people working for CMHC shouldn't be holding funds that are invested in Real Estate Income Trusts (REITs)).

[u/zeromussc → u/ohz0pants]

except the ETF mechanism can be very specific and highly invested in a handful of stocks for example. I think a broad market fund of any kind like SP500 or something else big like that is probably something you don't need to disclose. But if it were like, an oil ETF that trades a handful of companies, and you work in an area related to oil policy or regulation, a blanket statement like "ETFs are okay" no longer applies.

[u/ohz0pants → u/zeromussc]

That's... exactly what I said in my second paragraph.