SEC Under The Microscope?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

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.

http://www.accountingobserver.com/blog/

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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