When Voluntary Becomes Obligatory — Regulatory Creep and the SEC yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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The SEC has restored the authority of senior Division of Enforcement officials to initiate investigations without requiring approval by the SEC. This authority was originally established in 2009, but later revoked in 2017. On February 9, then-acting SEC Chair Allison Herren Lee reestablished senior enforcement staff’s ability to issue subpoenas and take sworn testimony sua sponte. This approach will likely decentralize and accelerate the approval process for investigations and enhance the Enforcement Division’s investigative autonomy.
Days later, the SEC also reversed course as to its procedure for waiving automatic disqualifications that the federal securities laws and regulations impose on so-called bad actors. On February 11, Lee announced that a settling party may no longer request joint consideration of enforcement action settlement offers with waiver requests. This reinstitutes a bifurcated process to consider
Monday, May 10, 2021
While the U.S. Securities and Exchange (SEC) has not been very active in holding companies accountable for failing to report climate-related information, litigation under state provisions and the growing urgency of climate-related risks has shown the need for more active enforcement.
In recent years, states have pursued companies for allegedly making misleading financial disclosures in violation of state statutes. In 2015, for example, the New York Attorney General entered into a settlement with Peabody Energy Corporation involving misleading disclosures under New York-specific statutes. After subpoenaing internal records that showed the company had made internal market projections showing severe negative impacts from certain potential laws and regulations and had failed to disclose those projections to the public, the company
Tech giants, including Salesforce.com, Apple and HP, are joining calls for uniform regulations requiring corporations to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, citing a need for consistent, comparable and reliable data.
Gensler Says SEC Will Enforce Reg BI ‘As Written’ In a testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services, the new SEC Chair noted the regulator would evaluate Reg BI, and update and freshen it if need be.
During a congressional hearing this week, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler told lawmakers the agency would make sure firms are complying with Regulation Best Interest “as written.” But investor advocates say there is still latitude to add more teeth to the rule through additional guidance.
“It’s important that investors actually have brokers take their best interest at heart,” Gensler said, in response to a question about Reg BI from Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.). “And that’s what we’re going to do; through examination, enforcement, and guidance, ensure that the rule is fully complied with as written.”