The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to use the $150 million budget boost that it received under the CRomnibus spending bill that passed in December to hire an additional 72 examiners for investment advisors and investment companies in 2015.
The agency will dedicate $305 million of its budget to its Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations in 2015.
President Barack Obama's fiscal 2016 budget, released Monday, would allocate $1.722 billion to the SEC, a 15% increase from the FY 2015 enacted level, and allow the agency to hire 431 additional staffers — 225 would be added to the agency's OCIE, 180 of whom would examine advisors and investment companies. Ninety-three staffers would be devoted to enforcement, and 37 new positions would be added to bolster market oversight, including overseeing newly registered entities and to perform economic analysis.
OCIE expects to add 105 examiners total in 2015.
The SEC stated in its FY 2016 budget, released Monday, that without additional resources, "it is likely that the coverage level of investment advisors will remain in the range of 10% annually."
However, if the requested resources under Obama's 2016 budget "become available," the regulator estimates that, once all the requested examiners are hired and trained, advisor coverage should reach 14%.
The CRomnibus bill allocated $1.5 billion to the SEC, which is $150 million more than the agency's fiscal 2014 enacted level but $200 million less than the $1.7 billion requested by Obama for 2016.
The SEC goes on to state in its budget that "due to significant resource limitations, roughly 40% of registered advisors have never been examined. Even when excluding the influx of advisers that have registered more recently in the last three years, the percentage of firms never examined is still approximately 20%."
