2020 Risk Assessment Questionnaire Notice

We are writing to provide you with notice that on June 11, 2020 you will receive a risk assessment questionnaire (2020 RAQ) from staff of the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC). The deadline to complete and submit the 2020 RAQ will be August 6, 2020, which provides firms with eight weeks to complete the 2020 RAQ instead of the usual six weeks. The 2020 RAQ will be asking for information for the period(s) ending December 31, 2018 and December 31, 2019.

Key changes to the 2020 RAQ were outlined in an advance notice email sent to all registrants on January 30, 2020. A copy of this communication is on the OSC website and you may access the document by clicking on the following link. On March 16, 2020 a press release was issued announcing a postponement of the 2020 RAQ in light of COVID-19. While we appreciate that firms are continuing to deal with the impacts of COVID-19, we made the decision to issue the 2020 RAQ. It is an important source of information about our registrant population which impacts many aspects of our work. We have prepopulated information where possible and the questions in the 2020 RAQ will be substantially similar to those in the 2018 RAQ.

To assist you in completing the RAQ, we will be providing the following:

  • a 2020 RAQ User Guide
  • a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs)
  • an Okta User Guide
  • a Help Page for each section of the RAQ
  • the contact information of dedicated staff members to whom you can direct your questions
  • a webinar Registrant Outreach session which will be scheduled in June 2020

Since the periods covered by the 2020 RAQ do not include any of the months when registrants were dealing with the impacts of COVID-19, we will also be sending you a short survey to gather information from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2020 on the impact of COVID-19 (Survey) on your operations. We will review this information and assess how it is going to inform our on-going compliance activities. We are mindful of the resource implications on registrants to have to complete both the 2020 RAQ and the Survey and have limited the number of questions and the data points in the Survey to a minimum with a focus on COVID-19. The Survey will be sent via email on July 9, 2020 with a deadline of August 6, 2020 to firms domiciled in Ontario and to some firms where we are not the principal regulator because we are collecting this information for them.