Throughout the week over at Securities Docket I highlight the most interesting columns and blog posts from around the web on the subjects of SEC enforcement and securities litigation. Here is a digest of my picks for the week ending January 4, 2014.

Law 2014: In White Collar Crime, It's Deja Vu All Over Again

Christopher M. Matthews, WSJ Law Blog

As the 2013 year in white collar crime wraps, 2014 could well prove to be a broken record. White collar defense attorneys tell us that following a banner year, lawyers at the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission will continue to dip into their bread and butter.

So, as we watch the ball drop on 2013, keep your eyes on three familiar enforcement areas in the new year: insider trading, accounting fraud, and, you guessed it, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

“Whistleblowers” and Tipsters at the SEC

David Smyth, Cady Bar the Door… The difficult truth here is the Commission cannot pursue everything it's confronted with.  There is more securities fraud in the world than the SEC can address.  And, given the numbers involved, that last piece is very hard to do, especially given the consequences of getting it wrong.  Most tips that lead to successful enforcement actions are easy to read in retrospect.  They're much less clear when hidden in a stack of 30,000 similar ones.  But you can't “always take the call,” and you can't even treat all tips equally.  Some of them are truly insane; others are clear and easily verifiable. The vast majority lie somewhere in the middle, and it takes a lot of talent and hard work to figure which is which.

Clawbacks? They're Still a Rare Breed

Gretchen Morgenson, The New York Times

The Fifth Third case is interesting because it shows that securities regulators can indeed require executives to pay penalties out of their own pockets when they settle charges of flouting securities laws.

But the regulatory action is also notable for what it did not involve: an executive pay clawback under the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Indeed, the Fifth Third action illustrates how challenging it is for regulators to mount such cases.

Should insider trading really be considered a crime?

John Carney, CNBC

In other words, our ban on insider trading isn't really about protecting investors or making markets function better. It's about expressing a moral view, much like we do with Blue Laws that ban the sale of alcohol on Sundays.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with encoding morality into securities laws. But should Steinberg really be facing a possible sentence of 85 years for violating our moral sentiments?

S.E.C. Tension as It Examined Mortgage Cases

Peter Eavis and Ben Protess, DealBookAfter many months of investigating the roles of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Standard & Poor's in troubled mortgage securities — and even warning the companies that enforcement actions were possible — the S.E.C. closed or shelved these cases and at least two others.

While these outcomes have been known, the reasoning behind the decisions and the contentious way they divided camps within the agency illuminates how difficult choices are made inside the regulator. The S.E.C. comes to its decisions, interviews show, after contentious discussions over the strength of evidence and the likelihood of winning at trial.