SEC Risk Czar Fishkin Has Stepped Down

Charles Fishkin, who joined the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 to head up a risk unit charged with detecting fraud, many say successfully, has left for a position with AllianceBernstein, Dow Jones reports.

Lori Richards, head of the SEC compliance, inspections and examinations, said Fishkin and his three-member team—a budget crisis killed plans for a 15-member division—have been “enormously helpful” in helping her office pinpoint which companies to inspect.

“We simply didn’t have enough resources to look at everything all the time,” she said. One problem area Fishkin helped detect, she noted, was mutual funds paying brokerages for shelf space.

Walter Ricciardi, deputy enforcement director, also had praise for Fishkin, saying he trained his staff how to look for new risks, rather than just react to existing scandals.

And Fishkin himself seems to believe his office did an exemplary job. “Anticipating issues is really part of the way we think and act now,” he said. The SEC has changed from “being strictly a reactive organization to one that really [is] anticipatory in addressing risks,” he added.

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