SEC to Congress: We Fight The Good Fight

Testifying before Congress on Tuesday, the five Securities and Exchange Commissioners said they were doing a good job of policing corporate America.

“The initiatives underway at the Commission have a common theme: they are aimed at benefiting investors whose returns are dependent on healthy, well-functioning markets,” SEC Chairman Christopher Cox testified. “We have created special working groups within our enforcement division to deal with emerging risks such as hedge fund insider trading, stock options backdating, and microcap fraud. Earlier this year we filed the largest insider trading case against Wall Street professionals since the days of Ivan Boesky and Dennis Levine, involving major Wall Street firms as well as hedge funds.”

The SEC said it has fined nine companies in the first half of 2007, compared to a record high of 11 in a single year. It also noted how it is going out of its way to protect senior citizens and military personnel, review mutual fund fees and expenses, create plain English disclosure and XBRL data tagging, scrutinize soft dollars and has plans to put new proxy rules in place ahead of the 2008 proxy season.

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