One of the struggles with implementing a compliance program for a private equity fund is that the Investment Advisers Act is targeted at retail operations dealing with relatively liquid investments. Neither fits well with the private equity model of institutional investors and large, illiquid transactions. Most of the guidance and discussion about how to implement a compliance program focuses on the retail side. Given the changes coming from Dodd-Frank, most private fund managers will need to register with the SEC as investment advisers.
Private equity firms are going to need some good guides to help them out. PEI Media just published The US Private Equity Fund Compliance Guide. It is a useful resource to private equity firms putting together a compliance program.
Since it was just put together this year, the guide includes most of the new laws and regulations coming out of Dodd-Frank as they relate to private equity fund compliance. Of course, given the huge slate of rule-making in the pipeline, the guide will start getting out-of-date. You need to start sometime and the regulatory framework will continue to evolve.
Charles Lerner of Fiduciary Compliance Associates took the helm as editor of the guide and farmed out the individual chapters to a talented group of contributors. Most chapters do a great job of trying to translate the regulatory regime of the Investment Advisers Act to the realities of a private equity fund manager. A few chapters come up short. They merely tack on a paragraph at the end of the chapter pointing out that much of the preceding is irrelevant for most private equity firms or fail to provide a meaningful discussion for private equity.
Some chapters do a great job of addressing the problems that are more closely associated with private equity. The “Side Letters” chapter does a great job putting those agreement in the context of potential conflicts and the requirements of the Investment Advisers Act. I would give the same praise to the “Identifying Potential Conflicts of Interest” chapter.
Overall, I found the guide to be a great resource in helping me to craft my compliance program. My copy is already getting filled with notes and annotations. The downside it that it’s expensive: $795.
You can take a look at the table of contents for the guide 
and see how it fits into what you are doing and whether it would be worth the price.
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