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On 7 April 2026, the SEC announced its fiscal year 2025 enforcement results, speaking not only to key actions from the past year but also to its vision for enforcement going forward. The results were the first from the commission under Chairman Atkins, and featured several notable elements:
- Statement of “Core Mandate”: The focus of enforcement is addressing fraud by market participants, including through appropriate remediation and repaying investors’ losses. Chairman Atkins commented that resources are directed toward “fraud, market manipulation, and abuses of trust.”
- Emphasis on individual wrongdoers: Approximately two-thirds of standalone actions charged individuals (a 27% increase).
- Quality over quantity. The release starts by stating, “central to an effective enforcement program is determining which cases to bring.” It also criticized past practices “run[ning] up numbers” in a way that created “misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement.”
- 30% reduction in standalone cases: In total, the SEC filed 456 enforcement actions (303 standalone and 69 follow-on proceedings) a nearly 30% drop from the 431 standalone cases it brought last year.
- Relief Obtained: The SEC obtained orders for monetary relief totaling US$17.9 billion, and for the first time reported the amount of recovery it deemed satisfied by separate non-SEC cases, showing that actual money recovered by the SEC alone action was less than a third of the total.
- Closed Cases: The release also included a new metric—the number of investigations that were closed (1,095), showing the SEC’s use of discretion.
- Types of actions this Commission is unlikely to bring. These include off-channel communication cases, crypto firm registration-related cases, and “definition of a dealer” cases that “identified no direct investor harm.”
- TCRs: The Commission received a record number of tips, complaints, and referrals (53,753), up almost 19% from last year’s record-breaking number.
The release highlighted the benefits of cooperation, remediation, and self-reporting. It also identified several cases of note, including actions involving Ponzi schemes, misappropriation of retail investor funds, misleading disclosures by an issuing company, investment adviser failure to adequately disclose conflicts of interest, and insider trading.
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