“Parody of Justice”: PIABA Responds to New FINRA $100 Million Member Rebate Amid Ongoing Crisis of Unpaid Awards
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 24, 2026 – The Public Investors Advocate Bar Association (PIABA) condemned the recent decision of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Board to issue a new $100 million rebate to its active member firms, rather than addressing the multimillion-dollar crisis of FINRA members persistently failing to pay FINRA arbitration awards.
The announcement follows a separate $50 million FINRA rebate paid to its member firms just last year, and at a time when FINRA has also raised consumer arbitration fees.
Between 2020 and 2024, approximately $80 million of FINRA arbitration awards went unpaid. In 2024, 37 cents out of every dollar of FINRA arbitration awards to customers went unpaid, and one out of four cases where damages were awarded went unpaid. Since most investor claims that seem likely to go unpaid are never pursued in the first place, the scope of the problem is even larger than the statistics indicate.
Michael Bixby, president of PIABA and managing attorney for Bixby Law PLLC, said: “This is a parody of justice, and it tarnishes the reputation of FINRA as an institution that is supposed to protect investors and promote market integrity. Retirement savers and investors who are the victims of misconduct rely on FINRA’s arbitration forum to hold bad actors accountable. That is part of FINRA’s job. It’s unconscionable that FINRA has now paid out over $150 million to Wall Street, all while innocent Main Street investors are still waiting for justice and to put their lives back together.”
Both FINRA payouts to Wall Street have occurred after a fee increase for investors to even file their arbitration claims. This increase was justified by FINRA as necessary to provide sustainable funding for their regulatory mission. Now FINRA is nickel-and-diming Main Street to appease Wall Street.
PIABA has been studying the issue of unpaid arbitration awards for years, and its most recent analysis found that the unpaid awards crisis is still growing. PIABA continues to urge FINRA, Congress, or the SEC to deal with the unpaid arbitration award problem head-on.
Earlier this month, PIABA testified before the House Financial Services Committee’s Capital Markets Subcommittee in a hearing titled “The Role of Self-Regulatory Organization in U.S. Markets: Examining FINRA and the MSRB.”
Recently, PIABA also publicly called on FINRA to reject self-serving arbitration reform recommendations from the industry trade group SIFMA, demanded an immediately halt to FINRA’s proposed Outside Business rule amendment, urged it to end its incorrect application of Rule 12407(a), and highlighted several concerns about the FINRA 26-02 – Rule Revisions.
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ABOUT PIABA
Public Investors Advocate Bar Association is an international, not-for-profit, voluntary bar association of lawyers who represent claimants in securities and commodities arbitration proceedings and securities litigation. The mission of PIABA is to promote the interests of the public investor in securities and commodities arbitration, by seeking to protect such investors from abuses in the arbitration process, by seeking to make securities arbitration as just and fair as systemically possible and by educating investors concerning their rights. For more information, go to www.piaba.org.
MEDIA CONTACT: Max Karlin at (703) 276-3255, mkarlin@hastingsgroupmedia.com.