By Chris Prentice
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday said it assessed $3.9 billion in fines related to enforcement actions in fiscal 2021, down from a record $4.7 billion in 2020, even as standalone actions increased.
The top U.S. markets regulator said it assessed $1.4 billion in penalties and another $2.4 billion in ill-gotten funds disgorged through 697 actions. That compared with $1 billion in penalties and $3.6 billion in disgorgement across 715 cases in 2020.
Standalone enforcement actions increased to 434 from 405 previously, but remained below the prior five-year average, the annual report said. In fiscal 2020, a handful of sizeable cases drove the bulk of the agency’s collections.
The SEC brought a series of first-of-their kind actions, including the first case against a decentralized finance (DeFi) firm, fraud charges against an alternative data provider and securities law violations on the “dark web,” according to the report.
The year’s actions included a large resolution with Goldman Sachs, in which the company agreed https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-265 to pay about $1 billion to settle SEC charges related to the 1MDB scandal, an accounting controls case https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ge-sec/u-s-sec-says-ge-to-pay-200-million-penalty-for-misleading-investors-idUSKBN28J345 against General Electric Co and charges against Kraft Heinz and two former executives related to a years-long expense management scheme https://www.reuters.com/article/kraft-heinz-usa-sec-idCNL1N2Q5105.
The SEC also brought a rare litigated case https://www.reuters.com/article/att-sec-idCNL2N2L32WD against AT&T Inc and three executives for allegedly disclosing material nonpublic information to research analysts.
The SEC said it doled out a record $564 million to 108 whistleblowers in fiscal 2021.
(Reporting by Chris Prentice in WashingtonEditing by David Gregorio and Matthew Lewis)
