The House voted today 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.
See POGO’s press alert for our statement on today’s vote.
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.
Last month, POGO and other groups called on Congress to remove the broad and troubling secrecy measures in Section 929I. At a subsequent hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, POGO Director of Public Policy Angela Canterbury urged Congress to repeal Section 929I rather than allowing the SEC to issue its own internal guidance implementing the provision as it saw fit.
Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle responded immediately once it became clear that Section 929I had gone too far in allowing the SEC to withhold information. Several bills were introduced in the House to repeal Section 929I, including bills introduced by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., and Ranking Member Darrell Issa, R-Calif., both of whom testified at the Financial Services Committee hearing last week. On the Senate side, S. 3717 was introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, John Cornyn, R-Tex., and Ted Kaufman, D-Del., all of whom have been longtime champions of open government.
In a statement on the passage of the House bill, Senator Leahy remarked that "this new law will ensure that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) remains an effective tool to provide public access to information about the stability of our financial markets."
But while Congress has acted quickly to reverse the blanket secrecy measure sought by the SEC, more must be done to ensure the agency is following President Obama’s order to operate with a presumption in favor of disclosure.
POGO called on Congress to make the SEC more open and accountable moving forward. In her testimony last week, Canterbury highlighted a recent Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit which found that the SEC has one of the worst FOIA release rates of any agency in the federal government. She recommended follow-up audits by the OIG to ensure that the SEC is fully implementing its recommendations for complying with FOIA and the Obama Administration’s guidance on transparency and disclosure. She also urged Congress to review the SEC’s use of the existing FOIA exemptions, especially Exemption 8, which will be expanded with the enactment of S. 3717.
In addition, Canterbury raised concerns about the SEC’s practice of heavily redacting and withholding OIG reports, an issue that was also raised in yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on the failures of the SEC’s investigation into the Stanford Ponzi scheme.
-- Michael Smallberg
See also:
The only government secrets should relate to the military and security agencies only. And those secrets should be known to specific members of Congress with top secret security clearance.
On the other, WE THE PEOPLE should install video cameras and microphones in virtually all government offices, bug every phone and monitor every computer and internet action.
They work for us, so we have a responsibility to monitor our employees in our government.
We also have to end our government's illegal and unconstitutional wholesale spying on the entire country.
Posted by: Kevin Schmidt | Sep 30, 2010 at 02:33 PM
Mr. President, why don't you address mortgage fraud which caused billions of dollors loss for the Americans? Why not hold Wells Fargo accountable for making mortgage loan based on hugely inflated appraisal?
How many jobs have to be created and how hard taxpayers have to work in order to fill up the deep hole mortgage fraud has created for the society? Bottom line, where is justice when the largest mortgage lender Wells Fargo is foreclosing home based on fraudulent loan and hugely inflated appraisal. Isn't it prosecutable crime that majority of State Attorney General's offices are posecuting?
Where is HOPE for homeowners? Is it too much to expect that Wells Fargo, the largest mortgage lender in US not to defraud homeowners like us by making fraudulent loan and
foreclosing home based on hugely inflated appraisal?
Wells Fargo committed prosecutable crime against us. We lost our home.
Something is wrong with this picture. Here are the facts.
1. it is illegal for Wells Fargo to make mortgage loan to us based on hugely inflated appraisal.
Fact: – Wells Fargo’s fraudulent appraisal valued our home at $718,000
- Wells Fargo’s own review appraisal valued our home at $475,000
- Nevada Attorney General’s office suspended the appraiser’s license for committing appraisal fraud on our home.
- Nevada Appraiser Licensing Board mandated the appraiser to complete appraisal fraud course before regaining his real estate appraiser license.
- Nevada Revised Statue NRS 205.372 states that it’s category C felony to make mortgage loans based on fraudulent appraisal.
- Cases of Attorney General’s indictments against attorneys, loan brokers for teaming up make fraudulent loans to defraud homeowners.
2. it is illegal for Wells Fargo to wrongfully foreclose our home based on fraudulent appraisal and mortgage loan.
www.wellsfargomortgagefraud.com
Posted by: donna | Sep 24, 2010 at 12:35 AM