The Securities and Exchange Commission announced its enforcement results for the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2025.
Describing the year as “a unique period of transition” under the new presidential administration, the SEC asserted that the commission’s resources “have been misapplied in prior years to pursue media headlines and run up numbers, and in turn, led to misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement. “
The SEC said it filed 456 enforcement actions during fiscal year 2025, including 303 standalone actions and 69 “follow-on” administrative proceedings seeking to bar or suspend individuals from certain functions in the securities markets based on criminal convictions, civil injunctions, or other orders, and obtaining orders for monetary relief totaling $17.9 billion.
The commission said these actions demonstrated its prioritization of cases that directly harm investors and the integrity of the U.S. securities markets, including offering frauds, market manipulation, insider trading, issuer disclosure violations, and breaches of fiduciary duty by investment advisers.
They did not include the 1,095 matters in which potentially violative conduct was investigated and which were closed, the several matters where market participants remediated their practices, or cases that were otherwise not pursued.
In announcing these results, the SEC said the fiscal year had been characterized by an “unprecedented rush” to bring a significant number of cases in advance of the presidential inauguration.
“This period brought about the current Commission’s resolution of prior cases that were not sufficiently grounded in the federal securities laws,” the SEC said. “The current Commission deliberately refocused the enforcement program on matters of fraud—cases that inherently require more time and resources to develop and bring, often requiring up to two or more years to manifest results.”
In its fiscal year 2025 enforcement actions, the SEC obtained orders for monetary relief totaling $17.9 billion, of which was $10.8 billion in disgorgement of ill-gotten gains and prejudgment interest and $7.2 billion in civil penalties. Some of the orders for monetary relief included disgorgement amounts that the commission deemed satisfied, in whole or in part, by a court order in a separate non-SEC action (e.g., a restitution or forfeiture order in a parallel criminal proceeding).
“Over the past year, the Commission has put a stop to regulation by enforcement and recentered its enforcement program on the Commission’s core mission by prioritizing cases that provide meaningful investor protection and strengthen market integrity,” said SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins.
The SEC also said it devoted significant resources to protecting the interests of retail investors, who may be particularly vulnerable to securities fraud, while prioritizing identifying and remedying fraudulent conduct. The Division brought actions to address conduct involving fraudsters who targeted veterans, seniors, and members of a religious community.
Another priority was holding individual wrongdoers accountable for violating federal securities laws. Of the standalone actions filed during this past fiscal year, approximately two-thirds involved charges against one or more individual bad actors (a 27 percent year-over-year increase), and nearly nine out of every 10 standalone actions filed under Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda and Chairman Atkins involved individual charges. The SEC also obtained orders barring 119 individuals from serving as officers and directors of public companies.
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