SEC's Budget Increases by Half of Requested Amount

The Securities and Exchange Commission's budget increase for the rest of this year will be half, or 53 percent, of the amount requested.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's budget will increase by $74 million, according to the Senate Committee on Appropriations' summary of its budget bill for the 2011 fiscal year. This represents a 7 percent increase on the 2010 budget, bringing the agency's appropriations to $1.185 billion in total.

This budget increase is still $65 million less than the increase requested and $115 million less than the increase recommended by the Dodd-Frank Act for this year. That means the increase represents only 39 percent of what would have been necessary to meet Dodd-Frank recommendations.

President Obama had previously requested that the SEC's budget increase by $139 million in 2011, so that the agency could effectively implement financial reform, bringing the annual budget to $1.258 billion--a move that was supported by the Commission in its Congressional Budget Justification, released in February.

“The SEC's top priority is to reinvigorate its enforcement program, which in recent years has operated under a variety of budgetary and procedural constraints,” the agency said in the Justification. Therefore, 35 percent of the proposed increase would go towards the agency's compliance inspections and examinations.

The Dodd-Frank Act authorized the SEC's budget to $1.3 billion in 2011, $1.5 billion in 2012, and $2.25 billion by 2015, in acknowledgement of the new workload it presented. “So far, the SEC has proceeded with the first stages of implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act without additional funding,” said five agency directors, including Meredith Cross of the Division of Corporation Finance, in a March 10 testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services. The SEC is requesting $1.407 billion for 2012, the directors said.