David Becker certainly knew what he was getting into when he became the top lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2009. He had already done an earlier stint as the SEC’s general counsel at the beginning of the decade.
When Becker returned to the agency, however, the pressure was much more intense—not just because the SEC had to respond to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, but also because it was being blamed for helping create that crisis through lax oversight of the financial industry. Under current chairman Mary Schapiro, the SEC has set out to prove that it’s toughened up. The number of enforcement actions by the agency rose to 681 last year, an all-time high. And the SEC’s workload is increasing even more as provisions of the massive Dodd-Frank financial reform law kick in.
