A recent document request letter sent to hedge fund advisers newly registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission makes information requests to the fund's custodians and administrators. Officers of the custodians and administrators are required to sign lists of the requested information and send them directly to the examiners' office.

The document request letter was sent to a number of new registrants and contains particularly probing questions about the operations of private funds (CR, 5/8). It asks custodians to prepare a document confirming all the private funds' positions, including all cash balances and short positions. The funds' administrators are required to provide a confirmation of the interests of each investor in the private funds. The list must cover three items:

* Total number of shares outstanding if the fund is in corporate form

* Total number of limited partners

* Most recently calculated value of each limited partner's interest in the fund

Lawyers said they have not seen such a request before and it is indicative of examiners adopting an aggressive approach to inspecting private funds. Such requests have not been the usual procedure in inspections of registered funds, for example, said Edmund Bergan, senior counsel at Proskauer Rose in New York.