Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[marketmaven]

U.S. lawmakers criticize SEC over fund failures
Fri Apr 22, 2005 05:55 PM ET
(OCIE was a corrupted SEC unit and NASD bought-0 can't even comment NOW ! UFB!)

WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers criticized the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday for failing to find trading abuses in the mutual fund industry before September 2003 in scandals that cost shareholders billions of dollars. The criticism accompanied the results of a study done by government investigators who found the federal agency failed to detect market-timing misconduct because SEC officials were focused on other higher risk activities. (BS- these "late trading activities" were a well known mutual fund practice, look at the MFS situation where the Board approved lending to employees for these frontrunning trades)

Market timing -- or improper rapid buying and selling of mutual fund shares to profit from pricing inefficiencies -- was at the core of recent scandals that rocked the fund industry.

The SEC was caught flat-footed when the scandals emerged in 2003 due largely to investigations by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. But the agency responded later with probes of its own and a raft of mutual fund industry reforms. "The SEC must take a stronger position on finding, preventing and punishing abuses by insiders, or Congress will be forced take another look at how mutual funds are examined and regulated," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner.

"This report illustrates how mutual fund senior officers literally stole billions of dollars from honest investors," said the Wisconsin Republican, who chairs the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.

Sensenbrenner and the top Democrat on the committee, John Conyers of Michigan, requested the Government Accountability Office study into market timing. "Market timing abuses in the mutual fund industry are particularly offensive because most mutual fund investors are regular people, with no special experience or expertise with investing in the stock market," Conyers said.

The GAO report faulted the SEC's routine examination program run by its Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE), as well as brokerage regulator NASD, for failing to detect undisclosed trading abuses. "We have significantly changed our examination process to be better able to detect emerging areas of compliance risk and undisclosed practices," said SEC spokesman John Nester. "While detecting collusion is always difficult, agency inspectors are digging deeper and demanding more e-mails from firms."

Mercer Bullard, assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi, said the SEC missed the boat on detecting the scandal early. He said SEC staffers still need to communicate better with each other. Setting up the SEC's Office of Risk Assessment was an "excellent idea," said Bullard, a former assistant chief counsel in the SEC's Division of Investment Management." It was long overdue. A NASD spokesman declined to comment beyond the report.

The GAO report acknowledged the SEC has taken steps to strengthen its mutual fund oversight program, but said "it is too soon to assess the effectiveness of certain initiatives."