The SEC Is 'Scaring People Off': Hester Peirce

The Securities and Exchange Commission is “scaring people off from coming in and having a conversation with us,” SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said Tuesday.

Speaking at the Practising Law Institute’s SEC Speaks conference in Washington, Peirce, a Republican, said that “productive interactions with the SEC are fewer and further between than they were in the past.”

When individuals and entities “come to the SEC with their novel ideas, their feedback, their concerns, their objections, their questions about implementation of a new rule or application of an old one to new circumstances, too often now they are met with . . . well, crickets,” Peirce stated.

Peirce relayed that “Neither staff expertise nor issues ripe for analysis are lacking, so what has changed?”

In part, “the staff, run ragged by a punishing rulewriting agenda, does not have the bandwidth to think about hard, novel legal questions,” she asserted. “The remote work norm also may play a role as it reduces opportunities for spontaneous staff collaboration to work through tough questions.”

That being said, “the root of the problem, though, is that the Commission discourages the staff from offering much more than silence, shrugs, sighs, and slow-walking. The culture at the top of the SEC has changed, which in turn has changed the way the agency interacts with the public,” she expained.