Indulging in some end-of-the-year housecleaning, the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday swept through its rules and forms to remove references to credit ratings by nationally recognized statistical rating organizations.

The Dodd-Frank Act required federal agencies to review any regulation that requires the use of an assessment of the creditworthiness of a security or money market instrument, remove that requirement, and substitute their own standard of creditworthiness. In response, the SEC removed credit rating references from the following:

Forms N-1A, N-2, and N-3, which requires funds to report information about their activities to shareholders, including information about the credit quality of their portfolios.

Rule 15c3-1 under the Securities Exchange Act, a requirement that broker-dealers maintain more than a dollar of highly liquid assets for each dollar of liabilities, which helps ensure that if it fails, there will be sufficient liquidity to cover liabilities.

Rule 15c3-3 under the Securities Exchange Act, which prohibits broker-dealers from using customer securities and cash to finance the firm's own business.

Rule 10b-10 under the Securities Exchange Act, which generally requires broker-dealers handling transactions for customers in securities other than U.S. savings bonds or municipal securities to provide them with written notification of the terms of the transaction at or before its completion.

The SEC held off making changes to Regulation M, a set of anti-manipulation rules for the securities marketplace, but plans to do so after further review. The announced amendments will be official 180 days after they are published in the Federal Register.

In a statement, SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher said the Commission "took a very important step towards addressing a key cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis”

“The NRSROs failed miserably in their ratings of asset-backed securities, especially residential mortgage backed securities, in the years leading up to the crisis,” he said. “These faulty ratings were a core cause of the financial crisis, and the incorporation of references to credit ratings into Commission rules exacerbated the problem. Regulators and investors relied on NRSRO ratings to their great detriment, and to the detriment of the U.S. and global markets.”