If their complaining is anything to go by, investors appear to becoming more comfortable with online trading. A new report from the U.S. General Accounting Office found that customer complaints are falling, even as the number of online accounts rises.

In the first quarter of 1999, securities regulators received an average of four complaints for every 100,000 online trades, by the fourth quarter of 2000 that is down to one complaint for every 100,000 trades, according to the GAO. Although trading volumes are down, the number of online trading accounts nearly doubled in the period, from 8.6 million to more than 17.4 million.

The report says that even though the industry has upgraded its systems and regulators are doing a better job of ensuring that investors receive better information in key investor protection areas, online investors continue to file a substantial number of complaints about failures and delays in processing orders. The concerns mentioned in the complaints also indicate a lack of knowledge about trading and investing.

It says, “To address the continuing concerns that investors have about failures and delays in processing orders, and to improve regulators’ ability to assess broker-dealers’ compliance with SEC capacity guidance, we recommend that the Acting Chairman of the SEC work with the industry to establish consistent and meaningful measures for outages and delays and to ensure that broker-dealers maintain consistent records of system slowdowns and outages that impact their customers.”

It also recommends that the SEC take steps to ensure that the conspicuous plain English disclosure of margin risk and the risk of systems outages or delays, and disclosure of trading risk be made on Web sites of broker-dealers that offer online trading.

Finally, the GAO invites the SEC to monitor the extent to which broker-dealers embrace recommendations on disclosing trading risk and the risk of systems failures, and on protecting investor records and information.