SEC

In their first bipartisan action as heads of the House Financial Services Committee, Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Ranking Member Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) introduced a bill to implement preventive measures against illegal insider trading.

H.R. 624 would do so by mandating certain restrictions on when issuers and issuer insiders are able to buy or sell securities during issuer-adopted trading windows, the number of trading plans they can adopt and how often they can modify their trading plans, among other things.

Find out what the Securities and Exchange Commission would have to do to implement the measure.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has identified and charged nine parties for taking part in a scheme to hack the agency’s EDGAR filing system to extract nonpublic financial information to engage in insider trading.

This was not the SEC’s first run-in with some of the defendants. In 2015, the hacker, Ukrainian Oleksandr Ieremenko, and some of the traders involved in the EDGAR scheme were charged in connection with a similar plot to hack unpublished information held by newswire services for the same purpose.

Find out more details about the cybersecurity issues raises by the case.

Barring an act of Congress to block or further delay its implementation, financial institutions will have up to three years to reconcile their accounting practices with the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) complex and largely unpopular new Current Expected Credit Loss (CECL) standard.

The financial regulatory agencies’ recent final rule affords certain institutions a transition option to help them adjust to the CECL standard’s day-one adverse effects pertaining to regulatory capital.

Find out what institutions qualify for the phase-in period and what requirements they must meet along the way.

Five federal financial regulators are seeking comments on a proposed rule that would exclude community banks from Volcker Rule restrictions. The jointly proposed rule implements a provision of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act.

FDIC Board Member Martin Gruenberg detailed what he believes should be considered when crafting such exemptions during a recent meeting with the FDIC Board of Directors, including asset thresholds and collateralized debt obligations.

Find out more details about how the exemption would impact community banks. 

The partial federal government shutdown will not directly impact most financial regulatory bodies but will impact various federal lending programs.

Multiple agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of the Treasury, have released contingency plans detailing how they will allocate their limited staffs for the duration of the shutdown to ensure fulfillment of essential functions.

Find out more details about the shutdown’s impact on federal agencies.

Through an expanded internal review of a software error that led to hundreds of denied mortgage modifications and subsequent foreclosures, Wells Fargo determined that the glitch had a wider reaching impact than previously thought.

The company disclosed in its recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the error resulted in more wrongly denied mortgage modifications and more wrongful foreclosures than previously indicated.

Find out more about what the company told Dodd Frank Update it planned to do to redress affected borrowers.

A broker-dealer and investment adviser agreed to a $1 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after investigators found that a data breach could have been avoided had it not been for faulty cybersecurity policies and procedures. 

This was the SEC’s first time invoking its Dodd-Frank authority to enforce the Identity Theft Red Flags Rule. 

Read on to learn more about the enforcement action.

In a move intended to better distinguish between guidance and regulation, the federal prudential regulators collectively released a clarifying statement regarding the role of guidance.

The financial industry and other interested parties believe the move is a positive step given the fact that past guidance issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under Richard Cordray’s leadership was deemed to have the same force and effect of a law.

Find out more about what the regulators intend to do going forward in this regard.

Citigroup recently agreed to pay more than $19 million in fines to the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for mortgage-related issues and unauthorized trading. 

The Fed fined the bank $8.6 million, citing improper handling of residential mortgage-related documents, while the SEC levied $10.5 million in fines against the company over allegations that employees engaged in unauthorized proprietary trading, and for failing to detect fraudulent loans issued by one of its subsidiaries.  

Read on to find out more about the settlements.

A new task force initiated by an executive order from President Donald Trump is intended to fight fraud through the combined efforts of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Trade Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures and Trading Commission, as well as other government agencies and officials.

The task force is the latest in a series of similar coalitions created by previous administrations.

Find out more about the functions and leadership structure of the new cooperative entity.