WASHINGTON — President Obama is proposing $1.26 billion of spending authority for the Securities and Exchange Commission in fiscal 2011, a 12% jump over the $1.11 billion that the administration projects Congress will make available to the SEC for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
The request includes $24 million that is conditional on the passage of financial regulatory reform legislation. It would allow the SEC to boost its total number of full-time employees to 4,190 from 3,816, and would increase the size of the enforcement division by more than 10%, to 1,368 from 1,237, SEC officials said.
Reinvigorating enforcement is the agency’s “top priority” in fiscal 2011, according to a “congressional justification” presentation posted on the SEC’s Web site yesterday.
As proposed, the fiscal 2011 would continue for the second consecutive year double-digit increases in the agency’s budget, allowing the agency to dramatically ramp up its staff after years of flat funding levels during George W. Bush administration, agency officials said.
“If enacted, the president’s request will do a great deal to help us keep pace with the continuing growth of the markets and provide necessary resources to support important regulatory initiatives in 2011,” SEC chairman Mary Schapiro said.
Though lawmakers have faulted the SEC for missing the $60 billion Bernard Madoff ponzi scheme and for being generally slow-footed in responding to the financial crisis, Schapiro has pushed through several changes since she became chairman a year ago, including a reorganized and more streamlined enforcement division and more than 10 major rulemaking proposals in her first year.
She also has called for self-funding of the SEC through the fees it collects from the entities it oversees, which currently generate $1.5 billion but are remitted to the Treasury Department.
Under the request, the division of trading and markets, which includes the office of municipal securities, would grow in size to 230 full time employees, from 197.
The budget proposal calls for “some amount of increased activity” tied to municipal securities, according to SEC officials said, who said it is too early in the budget process to break down specific numbers of personnel that might be hired for any one office within a division. Currently, there are just two full-time staffers in the muni office, Martha Haines, its chief, and Mary Simpkins, senior special counsel.
