SEC Under The Microscope?

CFO.com’s Sarah Johnson reports that Representative Barney Frank could schedule a Financial Services Committee hearing in late June in which SEC Chairman Cox and commissioners may be on the defensive.

Rep. Frank, chairman of that committee, sent a letter to Cox in late April in which he expressed his concerns about the SEC’s early-stage plans to make shareholders agree to mandatory arbitration over litigation, as reported in the Wall Street Journal in mid-April.

That hearing would happen if the Commission goes ahead with the plan. As the article points out, Frank is concerned that the Commission may be too soft in recent decisions. In an interview with CFO, he told them “he was irritated that the SEC had amended its executive compensation rules late on Christmas Eve without giving him the head’s up about the change…He said that the commission failed to grasp “how greatly they have pissed off America over stock options.”"

Which brings to mind Chairman Cox’s statement to a Reuters reporter a few weeks ago that resolution on many stock option backdating issues would be coming “within weeks.” It’s been weeks, and the only thing of note recently is that the investigation of suspicious option grant timing at Nabors Industries has been finished without consequence. Maybe Representative Frank is on the right track.

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