Lawyers and accountants at the SEC may find themselves going back to school if the “fraud college” for SEC staff endorsed today by Chairman Mary Schapiro is implemented. At a joint meeting today with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington, DC, Schapiro said that she thinks the “fraud college concept is a great one,” and that coordinating (sorry-harmonizing!) fraud-detection training with the CFTC “would be particularly valuable.”

Schapiro noted that the SEC is already providing new training to more than 300 examiners on ways to spot fraud after it admittedly failed to detect the Madoff scheme for decades.

How's this for an idea: going forward, all convicted securities fraudsters who had any degree of "success" with their scheme can earn some small amount of cooperation credit by teaching a class at Fraud College.