My recent article “The SEC and the Financial Industry: Evidence from Enforcement Against Broker-Dealers,” just published at the Business Lawyer (Vol. 67, p. 679, May 2012), provides an empirical account of the agency’s enforcement record against investment banks and brokerage houses in the period right before the 2007-2008 crisis. At the time, the SEC was the target of severe criticism from diverse quarters, ranging from scholarly commentators to the popular press and Congress. This article provides a systematic examination of the SEC enforcement record up to April 2007 and finds that defendants associated with big firms fared better in SEC enforcement actions, as compared to defendants associated smaller firms.

As this data suggests, the SEC faces three key decisions when formulating an enforcement action. One decision concerns whether to focus on the violations of individual employees of financial institutions, pursue the corporate entity that employs them, or charge them both. In two well-publicized rulings, Judge Rakoff chastised the SEC’s decision to direct its action exclusively against the firm and avoid individual liability. The article reveals that actions against big broker-dealers were more likely to target solely the corporate entity, without any further action against either frontline employees or high-level supervisors. More specifically, 40 percent of all actions against broker-dealers involved exclusively corporate liability, compared to just 10 percent for smaller firms.

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