A couple interesting things I heard this week from people who usually know what they're talking about when it comes to the SEC:

There were several articles today about the SEC's "Restacking Project," a reshuffling of offices for nearly all of the 1,900 SEC employees at its 3-year-old DC headquarter. The reshuffling is apparently an effort to correct a problem with the the initial office plan, which mixed up staffers from the various Divisions on each floor rather than maintain the Divisions on their own floors. The result of this original distribution of employees was that people in the same division had less communication with each other because they rarely saw each other, and had far more communication via email.

Someone commented to me today that in a more traditional arrangement such as the old SEC building (pre-1995), where the Division of Enforcement employees and groups sat together, many of the intra-agency emails that were fodder for the Inspector General's report in the Aguirre matter and the subject of scrutiny and criticism would never have existed. Instead, employees would have just walked down the hall to discuss cases verbally.

At a time when the SEC desperately needs a champion to represent it in Congress and in the transition effort, possibly to avoid being dispensed with altogether, some think it simply has no credible spokesperson right now. The Chairman has been relentlessly criticized amd marginalized for his role, or lack thereof, in preventing and responding to the financial crisis, and the Director of Enforcement has been the subject of harsh criticism in the IG's report in the Aguirre matter and also in a separate inquiry by Sen. Grassley related to questionable communications with JP Morgan about its possible acquisition of Bear Stearns. Who is left to be the SEC's champion?

Leader in the clubhouse for next chairman of the SEC? I'm hearing Harvey Goldschmid....