Partisan discontent appeared to break out in the hallowed halls of the Securities and Exchange Commission today, with the agency’s two Republican commissioners releasing a statement questioning the wisdom of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s regulatory agenda, which proposes amending a string of recent rules.
Gensler released the agency’s official “Spring 2021 Unified Agenda and Regulatory and Deregulatory Action” and the SEC chair’s agenda on Friday.
The action isn’t sitting well with SEC Commissioners Hester Peirce and Elad Roisman, who said that the agenda makes clear that Gensler’s recent directive to SEC staff to “consider revisiting” recent proxy voting advice “was not an isolated event, but just the opening salvo in an effort to reverse course on a series of recently completed rulemakings,” the commissioners said in a joint statement.
While “there are important and timely items on the list, including rules related to transfer agents and government securities alternative trading systems, the agenda is missing some other important rulemakings, including rules to provide clarity for digital assets, allow companies to compensate gig workers with equity, and revisit proxy plumbing,” the commissioners noted.
“Perhaps the absence of these rules is attributable to the regrettable decision to spend our scarce resources to undo a number of rules the commission just adopted,” Peirce and Roisman said.
The process of adopting rules can take years and often requires companies to make significant investments in compliance, technology, training and even staffing.
Despite that, Gensler’s new agenda includes proposals to further amend rules on conflicts and conflicted compensation and revisit the accredited investor definition, whistleblower rules, proxy updates, resource extraction payments and the harmonization rules.
“Not only are the commission’s most recent amendments to each of these rules less than a year old, they have only been effective for a range of three to seven months,” the commissioners wrote.
“As far as we can tell, the agency has received no new information which would warrant opening up any of these rules for further changes at this time. We are disappointed that the commission would dedicate our scarce resources to rehashing newly completed rules,” they added.
The fact that Gensler is asking SEC staff to revisit new rules and amendments may well mean that any regulation could be fair game for amendments, including Regulation Best Interest, one securities attorney who requested anonymity told Financial Advisor.