Section 967(c) of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires that “Not later than the end of the 6-month period beginning on the date the consultant issues the report under subsection (b), and every 6-months thereafter during the 2-year period following the date on which the consultant issues such report, the SEC shall issue a report to the Committee on Financial Services of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate describing the SEC’s implementation of the regulatory and administrative recommendations contained in the consultant’s report.”  The Staff of the SEC has issued a  Progress Report required by Section 967(c) for the period between March 10, 2011 and September 9, 2011.

 

More specifically, the Dodd–Frank Act directed the SEC to engage an independent consultant to conduct a broad and independent assessment of the SEC’s internal operations, structure, funding, and the agency’s relationship with Self-Regulating Organizations, or SROs. Issued in March 2011, the consultant’s study provided 16 optimization initiative recommendations designed to increase the SEC’s efficiency and effectiveness. In the six months since the study was issued, the SEC believes it has developed the necessary program management and oversight infrastructure to address the next step in the agency’s on-going multi-year change initiative: conducting a thorough analysis of each recommendation and designing appropriate approaches for those recommendations selected for implementation.

 

Over the next six months, the SEC believes significant work will have been done within each workstream to analyze the Boston Consulting Group’s recommendations and recommend what, if any, actions should be taken.  As the analysis completes, the agency will develop implementation options, then create a time-phased, multi-year implementation plan that accounts for constraints in the agency budget, management time, and agency priorities. The agency will focus on assessing the schedule, costs, and management bandwidth required for each initiative; identifying cross-work-stream integration points; and developing a detailed prioritization and implementation plan that sequences the various implementation activities. It is at that time the SEC believes that trade-offs and hard decisions must be made about how to best expend resources, time and funding.

 

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