Amid continuing discussions among lawmakers and regulators about how to reform the U.S. financial regulatory system, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission says enforcement, and in particular, cooperation with overseas securities regulators on enforcement matters, remains a top priority.

The SEC has been working closely with its international regulatory counterparts to “coordinate our actions and align our strategies” as the global credit crisis has unfolded, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox told a gathering of global securities regulators.

“In our global economy, regulators responsible for maintaining healthy securities markets have to make enforcement a top priority and have to reach across borders to do that job well,” Cox said in a Nov. 7 speech to participants at the SEC’s International Enforcement Institute.

Calling the scale of the agency’s international enforcement cooperation “massive,” Cox noted that, during the last year, the SEC made 556 requests of foreign regulators for assistance with investigations. Meanwhile, the SEC received 454 requests from foreign regulators for law enforcement help, “and we have been eager to provide it,” Cox said.

The SEC is also working with its foreign regulatory counterparts on 12 open sub-prime investigations.

Noting that the SEC executed an enhanced enforcement Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, Cox hinted that the agency is looking to forge similar ties with other regulators.

“We hope that this enhanced level of enforcement cooperation will serve as a model for other jurisdictions, and possibly set a new international standard for enforcement cooperation,” he said.

Such agreements would extend to the sharing of accounting information, including audit work papers, telephone and Internet service provider records, the confidential exchange of credit card records, travel records, employment information, and corporate records. Regulators would also assist each other in obtaining records of electronic and telephonic communication, testimony, responses to questions, and statements from witnesses.

As an example of cooperative international efforts, Cox cited a recent case in which the United Kingdom’s Financial Services Authority provided the Commission with intelligence that helped the SEC obtain an asset freeze in the UK against a UK citizen who was a defendant in a pending SEC action in Boston. In another cross-border case still underway, the SEC worked with Andorran authorities to obtain an asset freeze in a securities fraud scheme by a Spanish national living in Barcelona and operating through offshore companies based in Panama, Dominica, Belize, and the British Virgin Islands.

“In the United States, we fully appreciate that the long arm of the law has to reach not only from Boston to San Francisco, but also to Bangalore and Santa Domingo,” Cox said.

The SEC chairman also defended the agency’s enforcement record, which has come under fire in recent months. For the fiscal year just ended, he noted that the SEC brought the second-highest number of enforcement actions in its history, including a record number of insider-trading cases. Among those was a high-profile insider-trading action against former Dow Jones Board Member David Li and three others in Hong Kong that Cox said required “close and very real-time cooperation” with the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission.

In each of the last two years, Cox said the SEC has set the record for the highest number of corporate penalty cases in its history. The SEC has also brought a record-setting number of cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Since January 2006, the SEC has brought 38 foreign bribery cases—more than all prior years of the Act combined.

Cox said more than a third of the total staff works in the enforcement program, a higher percentage than at any time in the past 20 years. In the past year, enforcement personnel increased by 4 percent.

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