The Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking comment on its draft Strategic Plan. The document includes drafts of the SEC’s mission, vision, values, strategic goals, major initiatives, and performance metrics for fiscal years 2010 through 2015.
Draft SEC Strategic Plan for 2010-2015
Here is the new vision: The SEC strives to promote a market environment that is worthy of the public’s trust and characterized by transparency and integrity.
Here are the Strategic Goals and Outcomes:
Strategic Goal 1: Foster and enforce compliance with the federal securities laws
Outcome 1.1: The SEC fosters compliance with the federal securities laws.
Outcome 1.2: The SEC promptly detects violations of the federal securities laws.
Outcome 1.3: The SEC prosecutes violations of federal securities laws and holds violators accountable.
Strategic Goal 2: Establish an effective regulatory environment
Outcome 2.1: The SEC establishes and maintains a regulatory environment that promotes high quality disclosure, financial reporting, and governance, and that prevents abusive practices by registrants, financial intermediaries, and other market participants.
Outcome 2.2: The U.S. capital markets operate in a fair, efficient, transparent, and competitive manner, fostering capital formation and useful innovation.
Outcome 2.3: The SEC adopts and administers rules and regulations that enable market participants to understand clearly their obligations under the securities laws.
Strategic Goal 3: Facilitate access to the information investors need to make
informed investment decisions
Outcome 3.1: Investors have access to high-quality disclosure materials that are useful to investment decision making.
Outcome 3.2: Agency rulemaking and investor education programs are informed by an understanding of the wide range of investor needs.
Strategic Goal 4: Enhance the Commission’s performance through effective alignment and management of human, information, and financial capital
Outcome 4.1: The SEC maintains a work environment that attracts, engages, and retains a technically proficient and diverse workforce that can excel and meet the dynamic challenges of market oversight.
Outcome 4.2: The SEC retains a diverse team of world-class leaders who provide motivation and strategic direction to the SEC workforce.
Outcome 4.3: Information within and available to the SEC becomes a Commission-wide shared resource, appropriately protected, that enables a collaborative and knowledge-based working environment.
Outcome 4.4: Resource decisions and operations reflect sound financial and risk management principles.
Doug, Interesting to see that while the SEC recognizes that it should promote compliance programs both among regulated entities and public companies (pp 10-11) all the performance metrics for this part of the plan are related to the former. This is unfortunate because public company compliance programs are obviously important as well – but it is consistent with the SEC’s track record to date in this area. Hopefully, they will receive comments encouraging them to do more to promote public company compliance programs, too – particularly by crediting such programs (under the policy established by the Seaboard case) in a more public way than they presently do.
Jeff –
As they point out in the discussion of Strategic Goal 1, they want to stop the next Madoff.
Inevitably, with a focus on IAs, BDs and private investments, the next problem will come from public companies or investment companies.