After months of individual Commissioners and the Chair promising to do so, on December 15, 2021, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued proposed amendments to Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as well as proposing a number of additional disclosure requirements.
On 18 November 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) published for comment proposed amendments to the broker-dealer recordkeeping rules with respect to the use of electronic storage. The principal change would be to eliminate the current requirement that electronic records of broker-dealers be stored solely in a “write once, read many” (WORM) format.
The SEC Division of Examinations (Exams) recently published a Risk Alert discussing observations on investment adviser fee calculations resulting from a review of approximately 130 firms. This 2021 Risk Alert supplements a prior alert on the same topic that Exams (then, the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations) published in 2018.
In yet another step forward on the SEC’s path toward a comprehensive ESG disclosure framework, on September 22, 2021, the Staff of the Division of Corporation Finance issued a Sample Letter to Companies on Climate Change Disclosure, relying on the Commission’s 2010 Climate Change Guidance.
As predicted in our Connect on Tech discussion in March, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) is ramping up its examination and enforcement focus on cybersecurity at financial institutions, including scrutiny on actual implementation and deployment of published procedures in response to discovery of cyber breach incidents. Furthermore, the SEC appears to signal its expectation that multi-factor authentication (“MFA”) for email accounts containing sensitive client and customer information should be in place.
Continuing the practice of issuing Risk Alerts summarizing examination findings, which has only increased under the leadership of the now departing Division of Examinations (EXAMS) Director Pete Driscoll, on 21 July 2021, EXAMS issued such an Alert on fixed income principal and cross trades by investment advisers, a topic that the SEC Staff has been scrutinizing for some time.