I thought I had stumbled on to a Groundhog Day-type situation in June 2015 when the House Appropriations Committee froze the SEC’s budget at a level that was $222 million less than the SEC requested — exactly the same freeze and differential that occurred in FY 2012. Less than one month later, it is Groundhog Day again in Washington, D.C. with U.S. Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) re-introducing their bill from July 2012 (The Stronger Enforcement of Civil Penalties Act (SEC Penalties Act)) — accompanied by an amusingly similar press release.
You may recall that in July 2012, Sens. Reed and Grassley introduced the bipartisan SEC Penalties Act of 2012 to increase SEC penalties from a maximum of $150,000 per offense for individuals and $725,000 for institutions up to $1 million and $10 million, respectively. I know I do because I wrote an entire column about it. Alas, the SEC Penalties Act of 2012 never even made it to a vote and died in Congress.
