On November 22, 2024, the SEC released its fiscal year 2024 enforcement statistics.1 According to the accompanying press release, the SEC filed 583 total enforcement actions—431 of them standalone2 actions—while obtaining $8.2 billion in monetary sanctions, the highest amount in SEC history.
One headline is the SEC’s jury trial win in its fraud case against Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon. The SEC also highlights, among other things, matters involving off-channel communications, the Marketing Rule, the Dodd-Frank whistleblower protection rule, “AI washing,” and insider trading, market abuse, and safeguarding material nonpublic information.
The SEC classified 34 actions as insider trading cases and 97 actions as involving an investment adviser or investment company, both numbers in keeping with prior years.3 As usual, the press release also emphasizes individual accountability and discusses cases in which individuals were charged.
S&K Observations
The 431 standalone enforcement actions represent a significant drop from the 501 the SEC filed in fiscal year 2023. Relatedly, total actions fell to 583 in 2024 from 784 in 2023.
The record-breaking monetary sanctions do not necessarily reflect an across-the-board increase in sanctions for like cases. Rather, the case against Terraform Labs and Kwon accounts for more than $4.5 billion of the $8.2 billion total. The off-channel communications cases account for another $600 million. On an editorial note, crypto cases seemed to be deemphasized as a separate category in the press release, with such cases mixed into the discussion of other case types.
It is difficult to predict how the SEC’s enforcement priorities may change under a new administration. However, if the new SEC Chair is in the mold of Jay Clayton, the Chair for President-Elect Trump’s first term, we should not expect the statistics to change all that much. For example, the third highest year on record in terms of monetary sanctions was 2018, under Clayton. That same year, the SEC classified 51 actions as insider trading cases, the most over this last decade, and 108 actions as investment adviser or investment company cases.
