Bruce Carton

Recent comments by an SEC official about five insider trading cases generated from the Enforcement Division’s “Analysis and Detection Center” over the last year generated some questions in the blogosphere. Now Enforcement Action has some answers!

At a recent conference, an SEC official defended the agency’s use of administrative proceedings and flatly dismissed the notion that the SEC was using APs in order to gain a “home court advantage.” Rep. Scott Garrett didn’t like that one bit.

Today, the SEC announced that it has filed a settled administrative proceeding against Charles P. Grom, a former Deutsche Bank research analyst, for allegedly certifying a rating on a stock that was inconsistent with his personal view. The SEC alleged that Grom’s conduct violated the analyst certification requirement of Regulation Analyst Certification (“Reg AC”).

In a recently-issued report, the SEC’s Office of Inspector General concluded that there was no evidence to support allegations of bias on the part of Administrative Law Judges in the SEC’s administrative proceedings. The allegation had surfaced in a May 2015 article in The Wall Street Journal.

C. Dabney O’Riordan and Alka Patel have been named Associate Directors for Enforcement in the SEC’s Los Angeles Regional Office, where they will oversee that office’s enforcement’s efforts in southern California, Arizona, Nevada, and Hawaii.

After four years, the CFTC has so far paid out just two whistleblower awards totaling $530,000 while incurring millions of dollars in expenses. The agency’s inspector general stated recently that it has opened a review to “to determine the reason, if any, for the limited number of CFTC whistleblower awards compared to the SEC, and to recommend best practices in this area.”

The SEC might be feeling like a little like Oprah lately, handing out refunds the way Oprah hands out cars. “You get a refund! You get a refund! YOU get a refund!”