SEC Enforcement: An Update on the Latest Issues & Best Ways to Handle Them Webinar

To provide CPAs and other finance and compliance professionals with a practical update on current SEC enforcement developments, enabling them to better understand evolving regulatory priorities, assess enforcement risk, and prepare for effective engagement with government agencies and regulators.

• Leadership and the commission
• Navigating an investigation
  – Where investigations come from
  – Anatomy of an investigation
• Enforcement priorities
  – Insider trading
  – Offering frauds
  – Market manipulation
  – Accounting and disclosure fraud
  – Protection of retail investors 
  – Private funds and investment advisors 
• What is no longer a priority
  – ESG disclosure cases
  – Digital asset and crypto registration
  – FCPA
  – Cyber disclosure cases against victims
  – Recordkeeping and off-channel sweeps
  – Expansive and untested theories 
• The new accounting focus
  – The financial reporting and accounting unit 
  – Accounting and auditing enforcement actions
  – Individual accountability in financial reporting cases
  – The PCAOB under new leadership
• Process reforms
  – The enforcement manual overhaul
  – The end of “No-Deny”

Jina Choi, Partner, Gibson Dunn

Michael Diamant, Partner, Gibson Dunn

Anne McKinley, Assistant Regional Director, Division of Enforcement, US Securities and Exchange Commission
 

To provide CPAs and other finance and compliance professionals with a practical update on current SEC enforcement developments, enabling them to better understand evolving regulatory priorities, assess enforcement risk, and prepare for effective engagement with government agencies and regulators.

DETAILED LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Identify Chairman Atkins’s core enforcement philosophy and its focus on traditional fraud and investor harm

• Recognize the SEC’s foundational mission of investor protection, fair markets, and capital formation

• Understand the current organizational structure of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement

• Differentiate between enforcement priorities under prior SEC leadership and current leadership

• Explain the purpose and focus of the SEC’s Cross-Border Task Force

• Describe the role of the SEC’s Examinations Division in supporting enforcement activities

• Identify recent SEC enforcement trends related to crypto-related litigation

• Understand enhanced transparency and information-sharing expectations in the Wells process

• Analyze trends in SEC enforcement activity levels in fiscal year 2025

• Recognize common characteristics of recent large-scale fraud enforcement actions

• Looking back: what happened in 2025 and early 2026?
  – New leadership
  – “Back to basics” policy reset
  – Enforcement priorities and results
  – Voluntary case dismissals
• The current state:
  – Noteworthy organizational changes
  – Enforcement policy trends and priorities
  – Noteworthy process changes
• The road ahead: what’s next?
• Individual accountability and cooperation considerations 
• How to prepare:
  – Best practices for engaging with the government

Nekia S. Hackworth, Partner, Jones Day