Time to Fire the SEC’s Khuzami: Fails to Act on Whistleblower Tips Under Dodd Frank Program

As we’ve detailed in numerous posts, the performance of SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami has been abysmal. It was bad enough that the SEC was weak before the crisis. But the fact that the agency hasn’t upped its game in the wake of the biggest financial markets debacle in history is a colossal fail. And as we’ve pointed out, there’s good reason Khuzami has engaged in (at best) entering into settlements with banks that Judge Jed Rakoff described as mere “cost of doing business” level punishments. Any serious pursuit into the conduct at the heart of the crisis would have implicated him. He was General Counsel for the Americas for Deutsche Bank, and its senior trader Greg Lippmann was patient zero of toxic CDOs, so Khuzami was directly responsible for the failure to rein him in (specifically, note that Khuzami sued Goldman over one of 27 Abacus CDOs but did not sue Deutsche over a similar Deutsche Bank CDO program called Start).

The latest revelation makes it clear that the new head of the SEC needs to replace Khuzami. In Huffington Post, investigator John Powers describes how a well funded whistleblower program, created by Dodd Frank to prevent recurrences of the Madoff scandal, in which tips by fraud investigator Harry Markopolos were ignored. Powers describes in general terms the fraud he’s discovered, which includes a $200 million Ponzi scheme. He’s got the sort of background that the SEC ought to take seriously, and he also made clear he had the goods:

I submitted a detailed report to the SEC and offered to share my confidential files, which contain hundreds of pages of courtroom-ready evidence, including copies of email correspondence, internal documents, audio recordings and witness statements. My facts and my message were clear: “The risk to potential investors is extraordinarily high and this matter warrants further investigation by the SEC.”

Eight months later, he’s heard zip from the SEC. Now it’s hard to take that seriously in isolation; people who work to put together a damning dossier are often frustrated by the slow responses. It’s when Powers puts together the performance of the program that you realize something serious is amiss. The SEC has made one, repeat one, payout from its $450 million whistleblower fund last summer, a whopping $50,000. That was a full two years after the program was established. And there hasn’t been a single payout since then.

This is particularly distressing since whistleblowers are insiders and therefore should in many cases have access to the sort of internal documents that would serve to substantiate conduct and save the SEC a ton of time. In other words, this should be a prime, potentially its best, source of leads, since the SEC would be further along in case development if any of these tips had meat (ie, both damning info and on target with a clear violation).

The SEC is not suffering from a want of leads under this program. Again from Powers:

They’re digging out from under an avalanche of information, overwhelmed by tips of Wall Street crimes and corporate malfeasance. The SEC whistleblower program received 334 tips in its first seven weeks in August 2011, and over the past year has averaged nearly 10 new tips per day.

And Khuzami has confirmed that quality of the leads is good. From Thomson Reuters:

TR: How has the quality and type of whistleblower tips differed since bounties were offered than before they were established by the Dodd-Frank Act?

Khuzami: Anecdotally, the quality of tips has increased with more detail and greater supporting documentation. This may be explained by the fact that a greater percentage of tipsters are hiring lawyers to help them.

In large measure due to the publicity about the whistleblower program generated by Dodd-Frank, we’re seeing tips across a wider range of subject areas – financial disclosure, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, broker-dealer conduct, to name a few – and we are receiving tips from around the nation and many foreign countries. What we are not getting is an avalanche of frivolous and non-securities law related matters such as human resources and workplace claims that critics of the bounties said we would get.

And…drumroll…Khuzami claims to have restructured the agency to be better at this sort of triage process. From his Wikipedia entry (which reads like straight up PR):

He created a new system to collect, organize, investigate and data mine tips and complaints,[1] tens of thousands of which are received by the SEC every year. The new units focus on probes into investment advisers, investment companies, hedge funds and private equity funds; financial derivatives and other “complex financial products;” market abuses, such as large-scale insider trading and market manipulations; municipal securities and public pension funds; and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Khuzami obtained Commission approval to delegate to senior staff the authority to issue subpoenas without preapproval, and created the first-ever Office of the Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the Division to handle IT, project management, budget, HR and similar issues that previously had been handled by lawyers. Khuzami also hired industry experts, non-lawyers with genuine market expertise such as portfolio managers, traders, operations personnel, structurers, and risk managers who “know where the rocks are and what is buried beneath them.” Khuzami adopted these changes to make the Division smarter and quicker, noting “whether you are dealing with terrorism or securities fraud, it is better to be in the prevention business than the cleanup business. We want to be able to detect wrongdoing earlier in the cycle and minimize harm to investors.”

We have no choice but to conclude that this initiative was a cock-up. no matter how smart it sounds.

Powers contends that Khuzami’s problem is his strained budget and argues the SEC enforcement chief should use some of the whistleblower funds to pay for more staff to go through documents like his:

Though the SEC’s responsibilities have grown considerably, its enforcement budget — relative to total managed investment assets in the market — has fallen by nearly 50 percent since 2005….

Fulfilling your ethical duty to report a crime would require no reward in a corporate culture that truly values accountability. It remains to be seen what impact, if any, these bounties will have on Wall Street. The average year-end cash bonus at Wall Street firms exceeded $120,000 last year, and at Goldman Sachs it was nearly $370,000. The prospect of a $50,000 lump sum payment from the SEC is unlikely to persuade anyone in this crowd to put their job at risk.

The SEC now has almost a half billion dollars of taxpayer funds to pay informants. Most of that money would be better allocated to hiring more SEC investigators and enforcement attorneys, rather than paying bonuses to the same people the agency is supposed to be policing. Otherwise we’ll just be throwing good money after bad.

Now obviously, the SEC can pay more than $50,000 per informant, but the general observation still holds: that the nearest best term use of that $450 million would be to devote some of it to bulking up internally, particularly since the SEC is in no danger of running out of tipster money. If the SEC were to pay tippers $50,000 a day, it would take them 25 years to exhaust their kitty.

But Khuzami isn’t putting these funds to much use, nor, if there are impediments to him adding staff or hiring outside firms to help him go through the whistleblower submissions, does he seem to be complaining about it. It’s normal for budget-starved agency heads and department chiefs to bleat about how funding problems are crimping their operations. His apparent silence on this front (a quick Google search came up empty) says that not making much progress against the bad guys looks to be exactly how Khuzami wants things to be.

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19 comments

  1. Birch

    I can see a cheeky bounty hunter comic strip made out of this. The noble bounty hunters run around collecting hard evidence, and even momentarily tie up the criminals, only to have Khuzami show up at the end of the chapter and say ‘let em go.’ The bounty hunters are smart and work hard, but the payout never comes; so they live a meagre on-the-edge life beneath the high-rise buildings.

  2. ambrit

    So;
    What’s the status of the Congressional Committee that supposedly oversees the SEC? Are they captured?

    1. jake chase

      Nobody seems to understand the mission of the SEC: to give the suckers a sense of security. After the crash and at the bottom of the Depression, Roosevelt trotted out Ferdinand Pecora to blame everything on JP Morgan, the enemy of his sponsor, Rockefeller. But of course all those nobs were living off Wall Street, had been for years, so actually doing anything was out of the question. Instead they created the SEC, nominated arch crook Joe Kennedy to pretend to run it. He sat around for two or three years, then turned the reins over to James Landis, a Harvard law professor, most famous for failing to file income tax returns for five years and finally drowning himself in his pool when the jig was up. Meanwhile, corporate America was saved by WWII, the Fed-Treasury Accord, savings bonds, the Russian menace, the military industrial complex, out of which was created the mutual fund industry and people’s capitalism, the one swindle out of which at least a few prudent people could get rich, at least until the wholesale manufacture of debt reached crisis proportions and pop went the weasel. Game over. Welcome to the Really Great Depression, in which the world divides into four classes: those who have money, those who have jobs, those who have the hope of a job, and those who have no hope.

      Worrying about which stooge is put in charge at the Commission is about as fruitful as weighing the merits of Obama vs Romney. Does anyone really think these appointments are made on merit? OMG, Grow up. All you will ever get is token prosecutions of carefully selected third rate perps lacking elite sponsorship: Charlie Keating, Bernie Ebbers, Jeff Skilling, etc., etc. Has anybody seen Ken Lay? Oh, yeah, he’s dead. Died on a weekend vacation just before sentencing, thus voiding his conviction and saving all his dough. Of course, nobody bothered to view the body. Two doctors in Colorado took care of that with an affidavit. Right.

      1. ambrit

        Mr Chase;
        I seem to remember reading somewhere that Roosevelt resisted the idea of a Pecora Comission all the way up to its actual empanelment. Didn’t the Senate have something to do with that? I must agree that its a mugs game now, but in the old days there was such a thing as an appreciation of public sentiment. The phrase, “the law must be seen to work” comes to mind. Also, the “appearance of impropriety” had some weight once upon a time. All we need is the political will. LOL.

  3. JGordon

    In other words, Khuzami seems like he’s a shoe-in for the next SEC head. If that weren’t the case, I’d have at least acknowledge the possiblity that America doesn’t have a completely corrupt and degenerate society. But we all know that there is no danger of that happening.

    When the criminals run the prison, all we have to look forward to is the collapse. So just start prepping for it already.

  4. ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©

    The latest revelation makes it clear that the new head of the SEC needs to replace Khuzami.

    That would be Mary Schapiro, who is filling the same role at the SEC that Eric Holder has at the DOJ: protecting the banksters who bought Obama’s first term.
    ~

  5. oy

    While this certainly sounds damning, I don’t think Khuzami can go blythely spending money from one account to pay for unauthorized purposes. Governmental accounting and budgetary practices can be a royal pain in the ass that way when they prevent you from doing what needs to be done, but they are SUPPOSED to protect you from bureaucrats running wild with the people’s money.

    1. Yves Smith Post author

      It might help if you read the post….well you sort of did, but “sort of” doesn’t keep your comment from being a straw man, see boldface:

      But Khuzami isn’t putting these funds to much use, nor, if there are impediments to him adding staff or hiring outside firms to help him go through the whistleblower submissions, does he seem to be complaining about it. It’s normal for budget-starved agency heads and department chiefs to bleat about how funding problems are crimping their operations.

      1. charles sereno

        Yves, your last sentence, following on the quote above states — “His apparent silence on this front (a quick Google search came up empty) says that not making much progress against the bad guys looks to be exactly how Khuzami wants things to be.”
        Yves, got an extra glove lying around to slap him upside the cheek? Come on, Khuzami. Defend your honor. Take her to court. Or at least explain to us how hard you’ve been trying and how awfully tough it is. I calculate that, if you had collected as little as 0.00005% interest on your whistleblower fund, you’d have covered your payouts so far. Come on, man!
        Brava,Yves Smith!

  6. Norman

    I guess I’ve missed something, but isn’t the administration going after the whistleblowers as being terrorists or something to that effect? The country is doomed, or at least the future generations are, in less, well, I can’t say what I’d like too see as the solution here.

    1. ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©

      Yes, our Hope and Change President is doing just what you said.

      Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker and the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Fellowship, estimates that she has been detained more than 40 times upon returning to the United States. She has been questioned for hours about her meetings abroad, her credit cards and notes have been copied, and after one trip her laptop, camera and cellphone were seized for 41 days.

      ~

  7. Susan the other

    Khuzami is the “SEC Enforcement Chief” whose job it is to do triage for the financiers, not the investors! He has chosen to keep all the casualties on life support, not just his special interest, Deutsche Bank. So he won’t be accused of a conflict of interest. He knows he’s the goat. What we need is a new agency which oversees the SEC and protects not just investors, but the broader interests of society. The rationale being that when a system goes this busted it brings us all down, etc. Time to write off the SEC completely. Don’t waste the talents of a new SEC head like Barofsky; give him a new agency altogether.

  8. TNO

    I can’t imagine how this could happen, I mean we have watched for four years now as Obama gets told to “go play” while the adults (mostly ex wall streeters)do the hard work of running business that he just wouldn’t understand. “We will call you when we need you for your next View apperance. Until then play golf, go on vacation or just campaign for a while, and try to stay out of the way.”

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