Paul Atkins testifies before the Senate Banking, Housing, & Urban Affairs Committee during his confirmation hearing to be Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, on Thursday, March 27, 2025. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins said Thursday that the agency has "a robust pipeline of rulemaking set for the year ahead," and set out the agency's strategy to update its rulebook.
Speaking at the SEC Speaks conference, held in Washington by the Practising Law Institute, Atkins said the agency is applying an "advance – A, clarify – C, transform – T" strategy to its rulebook and regulatory frameworks.
For this year and next, Atkins said his goal "is to transform our rulebook by trimming immaterial requirements that burden the market without a corresponding benefit to investors."
Said Atkins: "Every initiative toward which the SEC is working — every rule that we propose, every interpretation that we release, and every institutional reform that we undertake — largely falls into one of three categories: Those that advance our rules to align with how markets operate today. Those that clarify our regulatory regime to streamline oversight and unlock innovation. And those that transform our requirements by eliminating both the burdensome and the impractical."
He noted that "many SEC disclosure requirements that began as a framework to inform have steadily become instruments to obscure, to insulate, and to sustain a highly specialized cottage industry of advisors and consultants."
One such drift has manifested "as a dragnet in places like Rule 17a-4, particularly in the so-called off-channel communications matters, through which the Commission allowed the extension of recordkeeping requirements for broker-dealers to a point that strains any common-sense understanding of the vague 'business as such' standard."
Atkins told lawmakers on Feb. 11 that the agency is working on updates to its rules governing off-channel communications, noting the "crazy quilt of different standards for different types of market participants — broker-dealers, advisors, rating agencies."
The agency's handling of off-channel communications over the last couple of years was "not the way a regulator should act," Atkins said in October.
Atkins told the lawmakers that the Commission is also working on an e-delivery rule, and has also signaled potential new accredited investor rules are forthcoming.
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