U.S. securities brokers are on record pace this year in making requests to clean up their public disclosure records, a lawyer for a national organization of state securities regulators said Tuesday. Brokers have made 354 requests so far in 2012 to expunge information such as details of customer arbitration complaints from records that investors and securities firms use to research brokers' professional histories, said A. Valerie Mirko, assistant general counsel for the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA). The number is almost as high as the 372 expungement requests brokers made during all of 2011 and is likely to increase in the final quarter, said Mirko, speaking in Coronado, California at an annual conference for NASAA, an organization of state securities regulators. Brokers' expungement requests so far this year have nearly tripled from the 126 total requests made in 2008, according to NASAA. The increase, say regulators, corresponds with a surge in
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