The senior staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Enforcement Division gets to keep its authority to issue subpoenas, a power granted to it on a pilot basis last year in an effort to speed the pace of investigations.
This time last year, the Commission adopted a rule that, for the first time, delegated its enforcement director, Robert Khuzami, with legal authority to issue formal orders of investigation—and therefore subpoenas—without getting prior approval from the agency’s five commissioners. Khuzami in turn delegated that power to other senior enforcement officials.
