Wyoming Real Estate Broker Exam — All Questions

The Wyoming Real Estate Commission may contract with an independent hearing officer to hear a contested case. That hearing officer may not be:

• a.An attorney who is in private practice in Wyoming
• b.A person who has decided an earlier real estate case
• c.An employee of the Commission or attorney general✓
• d.Someone who lives in the county of the violation

W.S. 33-28-113(a) lets the Commission contract with independent hearing officers and then names the only disqualification: the hearing officer "shall not be an employee of the office of the attorney general, or an employee or member of the commission." The point is independence from the two bodies that build and prosecute the case. A Wyoming attorney in private practice is the ordinary profile for the job, not a bar to it. Nothing in the statute disqualifies someone who has heard a real estate case before; experience is not a conflict. And residence is irrelevant, because the statute limits venue for judicial review under W.S. 33-28-113(c), not who may preside.

For each separate offense by a licensee, the largest administrative fine the Wyoming Real Estate Commission may impose is:

• a.$1,000
• b.$2,500✓
• c.$5,000
• d.$10,000

W.S. 33-28-111(a) authorizes the Commission to "impose an administrative fine not to exceed two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500.00) for each separate offense" alongside censure, probation, suspension, or revocation. The cap is per offense, so a course of conduct with several violations can total more than $2,500 even though no single count may exceed it. The $5,000 figure belongs elsewhere in the chapter: it is the criminal fine for a repeat unlicensed-practice conviction, or for a convicted entity, under W.S. 33-28-114(a). The $1,000 and $10,000 figures appear nowhere as a Commission fine; $10,000 is the recovery-account payment ceiling under W.S. 33-28-202(a). Note also that fines collected go to the public school fund of the county where the violation occurred, not to the Commission.

During a Commission investigation, a Wyoming responsible broker unreasonably refuses to produce transaction records he controls. That refusal:

• a.Must be tested by a court order before records are reached
• b.Is proper as to records that name a client of the firm
• c.Is excused once the transaction has already closed
• d.Is itself a separate ground for discipline under the Act✓

W.S. 33-28-111(a)(xii) makes "unreasonably failing to produce documents of record in his possession or under his control concerning any real estate transaction under investigation by the commission" a stand-alone ground for discipline, and W.S. 33-28-122(a)(iii) separately obliges every responsible broker to "permit the commission or its representative to examine the responsible broker's trust accounting records." No court order is needed, because the duty runs to the licensing agency under the Act rather than through civil discovery. Client identity is not a shield: the records the Commission examines are transaction and trust records, and the Act carries no privilege for them. Closing does not end the duty either, since W.S. 33-28-123 requires records to be kept for at least two years after the company last participated.