SEC secrecy repeal sent to Obama

from Project On Government Oversight:

The House voted Sept. 23 to repeal Section 929I of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which had provided the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with sweeping new powers to hide its records from public scrutiny. The House’s passage of S. 3717 comes just one day after the Senate voted unanimously to strike the troubling secrecy measure, and is the first legislative correction to the new financial regulatory overhaul law.

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Section 929I would have given the SEC the blanket authority to block the release of records in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and to withhold records in response to subpoenas filed by third-party civil litigants, even if such records were needed to expose corruption or incompetence at the agency. S. 3717 repeals these overly broad and unnecessary secrecy measures, and clarifies that an existing FOIA exemption, Exemption 8, will protect against the release of confidential information contained in the records of any entity that falls under the SEC’s regulatory authority.

Read more here.

Did Congress just exempt the SEC from FOIA?

from The Project on Government Oversight:

Like many others, we were outraged to learn yesterday that a provision buried in the financial reform bill may allow the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to ignore a vast array of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. But there is still widespread disagreement over the intent of this provision, and questions remain as to how it will be interpreted and applied.

In the meantime, Politico reports that House Oversight and Government Committee Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) will be introducing legislation later today to repeal Section 929I...

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We just took another look at the bill, and found this and another troubling provision that could potentially provide the SEC with broad FOIA exemptions. Section 404 also makes any information, reports, documents, or records provided by investment advisers of private funds to the SEC and the Financial Stability Oversight Council non-public.

Read the rest here.