For many years, Securities and Exchange Commission statements about the performance of its Enforcement Division have centered on the number of enforcement actions brought during each fiscal year. At the end of fiscal 2008, for example, the SEC issued a press release announcing that the 671 enforcement actions brought that year were the second-highest number of enforcement actions in agency history. The volume of actions brought, the SEC implied, resulted from “the dedicated enforcement staff … working around the clock to investigate and punish wrongdoing.”
Why the SEC does this is understandable. Unlike so many aspects of its vast enforcement program, ...