Almost three years after the Dodd-Frank Act directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to create an independent Office of Municipal Securities that reported directly to the chairman, the office is about to dwindle to two people.
Dave Sanchez, a lawyer who has worked in SEC muni office since September 2010, is slated to leave on Friday, three days after the commission's roundtable on municipal and other fixed income securities. He is leaving his post to become general counsel at investment banker De La Rosa & Co. in Los Angeles, where he will begin his new job on May 6.
The move leaves the muni office short-handed, with only its chief, John Cross, and Mary Simpkins, another lawyer, remaining.
The muni office had been staffed with four when it reported to the head of the trading and markets division. The office was not made independent until last September. Now it is about to shrink to half its former size.
But John Nester, an SEC spokesman, said Friday that additional staff for the office will be hired.
"The newly established Office of Municipal Securities is critical to the agency's effective oversight of this important market and will continue to grow," he said.
Cross, a former associate tax legislative counsel a the U.S. Treasury, became head of the SEC muni office last September. He has been widely praised as a good choice to lead the office but lacks the extensive securities law experience of some of the staff who have passed through the office. Cross was a partner at the Hawkins firm for 12 years. He served as counsel to the assistant chief counsel for financial institutions and products at the Internal Revenue Service from 1990 through part of 1993. He started his career as an associate at the firm now called Kutak Rock LLP in Atlanta and later was an associate, then partner, at Smith, Gambrell & Russell, also in Atlanta.
John McWilliams, a lawyer with more than 35 years' experience as a bond and disclosure counsel who came aboard at the same time as Sanchez, also left the SEC's muni office in late January.
Sanchez was an associate at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP after graduating from Harvard Law School in 1992. In 1998, he left to work as counsel for San Francisco for three years. From 2001 to 2004 he worked at Sidley Austin LLP, when he assisted the firm in its role as counsel to the state of California and its disclosure counsel practice. He was at Financial Security Assurance between 2004 and 2009 and worked on a broad range of credits in its San Francisco office.
