SEC Announces Fiscal Year 2015 Enforcement Results: Innovative Actions to Fight Corruption

The SEC just released its fiscal year 2015 results, which highlight the Commission’s stalwart determination to protect investors, hold companies and executives responsible for misconduct, and demand integrity in our financial markets. The SEC’s enforcement approach brought an amazing breadth and depth of cases spanning the entire securities industry. The Commission filed 807 enforcement actions, a nearly 7% increase from fiscal 2014, and obtained orders totaling approximately $4.2 billion in disgorgement and penalties.

The SEC’s Whistleblower Program continued to grow in fiscal 2015, awarding approximately $38 million to whistleblowers. The program’s many accomplishments included a case where [Jordan Thomas][prior firm][‘s] represented the whistleblower, in which the agency issued the maximum award in the SEC’s first retaliation case as well as a landmark action against a company for the use of confidentiality agreements to impede whistleblowers from communicating with the SEC. The evidence is clear: even as corporations seek to block its progress, this revolutionary program continues to gain momentum and make a huge impact on the industry.

The year also witnessed numerous other first-of-their kind cases as well as innovative leveraging of data and quantitative analytics by the SEC. The fiscal summary offers an extremely encouraging look at the SEC’s hard-driving quest to hold the securities industry accountable and ferret out corruption in all sectors, at all levels. And this year’s results make a powerful statement about the strength of the SEC’s enforcement efforts today and in the future.