Brokerage firms are up in arms over a proposal by one of their regulators to collect information about customers’ accounts and use it to keep tabs on salespeople.

That may sound like a great idea on the face of it, but the regulator in question, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, gets its funding from the firms it’s supposed to be regulating. And those firms don’t like the idea of sharing data on their customers’ buys, sells and portfolio positions.

I wrote about the battle between Finra and its members in The New York Times today. Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, told me that Finra’s proposal to get monthly data about activity in investors’ accounts could go a long way in preventing fraud because it would let Finra jump on problems more quickly:

“It creates a real deterrent,” she said. “Who’s going to churn an account if it immediately sends off a warning siren at Finra?”

You can read the story here.