"The SEC Speaks,” an annual conference held by the Practising Law Institute in Washington D.C., traditionally offers a forum for officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission to boast of progress and promote their agendas. This year, four commissioners took advantage of the forum to do just that.

Chairman Mary Jo White once again highlighted plans to revisit the Commission's disclosure regime. This year, the Corp Fin staff will focus on making specific recommendations for updating the rules that govern public company disclosure, she said.

The importance of technology advancements at the SEC was also cited. The Office of Risk Assessment and Surveillance is developing “exciting new technologies – text analytics, visualization, search, and predictive analytics – to cull additional red flags from internal and external data and information sources,” White said.

Commissioner Daniel Gallagher urged the SEC to once again focus on its “day job” after years of being sidetracked by the financial crisis and Congressional demands in the JOBS Act and Dodd-Frank Act.  

That job, he said, is to focus on its core mission and related rulemaking, something that all-too-often takes a back  seat, as evidenced by the recent finalization of broker-dealer capital and customer protection rules that languished in the proposal stage for seven years.

“When we neglect our obligation to update our rulebook and programs, we often find ourselves inviting further congressional mandates, such as was the case with the JOBS Act,” Gallagher said. “And, if we simply put our heads down and rotely implement each and every remaining Dodd-Frank mandate, it would take us over five years even at an unprecedentedly aggressive rulemaking pace. At the end of that period, I promise you, the agency would be a shell of its former self ranking at the very bottom of best-places-to-work surveys, and its jurisdiction would be overrun by bank regulators who want nothing more than to de-risk our capital markets to the detriment of investors and the U.S. economy.”

Gallagher's hope is that the SEC can strike the right balance between protecting investors and fostering market growth. “We cannot foster a nanny state ideal of securities law protection in which all investment decisions are insured and the government shields investors from all harm,” he said. “Capital markets are risk-taking markets, and unfortunately a risk as old and as certain as time is that where there is opportunity, there will be unscrupulous characters trying to take advantage.”

Commissioner Kara Stein put a review of the Commission's “bad actor” provisions atop her agenda. Currently, there are over a half-dozen bad actor provisions and if a firm violates the law or hits some other defined trigger, it is precluded from obtaining certain privileges, engaging in some types of offerings, or even conducting a certain type of business. 

“These bad actor provisions exist to protect the public interest and investors, and so we should be very careful in granting waivers from them,” Stein said. “We must ensure that we have a fair, sound and consistent basis for granting or denying a waiver request.”

Stein also stressed the need to finalize rules about executive compensation, including provisions requiring issuers to have policies in place to claw back compensation. “We should be empowering shareholders to take money back from executives who put their own personal gain ahead of the interests of shareholders and the firm,” she said. “And we should be working with the banking regulators to finalize a rule that would help ensure that our largest financial firms don't have executive compensation structures that encourage risky and potentially disastrous behavior.”

Commissioner Luis Aguilar focused on the need to revisit the role and regulation of transfer agents that serve as registrars for securities offerings and as intermediaries for companies by paying out interest, dividends, and other distributions to the record holders of stocks and bonds. Currently, there are approximately 460 transfer agents registered with the Commission, maintaining more than 276 million shareholder accounts.

“A renewed focus on transfer agents is important because their gatekeeper function will become even more critical as a result of new rules adopted pursuant to the JOBS Act,” Aguilar said. “These new rules are likely to increase the number of companies whose shares are traded in the secondary market without the benefits of registration.”