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SEC Commissioner Mike Piwowar – whose term expires in early June & who served briefly as Acting SEC Chair last year – will leave the SEC by early July, after serving nearly five years. Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ article:

Mr. Piwowar’s departure would leave the agency with four commissioners, meaning some votes could be deadlocked if the SEC’s two Democrats oppose measures favored by Chair Jay Clayton, a Trump administration appointee. That could slow Mr. Clayton’s progress on his priorities, which include stricter rules for brokers advising retail investors and lightening the regulatory burdens on public companies.

In theory, the White House and Senate could move quickly and nominate replacements for both Mr. Piwowar and Democratic SEC Commissioner Kara Stein, whose term ended last year. The Senate usually considers candidates for commissioners in pairs – one Republican and one Democrat.

Supplemental Pay Ratios: Not So Many (So Far)

Here’s something that I blogged last week on CompensationStandards.com: One of the big unknowns for the first year of mandatory pay ratio was whether companies would include supplemental ratios using a different methodology from the required rules. What situations would justify that extra effort? This Pearl Meyer blog notes that of the first 1039 companies to file proxies this year, only 99 have included a supplemental ratio. That’s less than 10%. Here’s what else they found:

– Most of the supplemental ratios were significantly lower than the required pay ratio.

– The desire to smooth out the impact of one-time or multi-year grants to a CEO was the most commonly occurring reason to provide a supplemental ratio.

– The most profound decrease from the required ratio occurred when companies provided a supplemental ratio that excluded part-time and seasonal employees.

– 14 companies provided a supplemental ratio that was greater than the required ratio, mostly likely to avoid a drastic increased ratio in 2019.

It’s possible that supplemental ratios will become more common in the future, as companies try to explain year-over-year pay ratio changes…

SEC’s Information Security Program: Not “Effective”

Recently, the SEC’s Inspector General released its audit results for the SEC’s information security program – as required by the “Federal Information Security Modernization Act.” Although the SEC’s program has improved, it didn’t meet the criteria to be deemed “effective” as of September 30, 2017. The SEC is supposed to submit a corrective action plan by mid-May that covers the audit’s 20 recommendations.

And in recent testimony before the House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee, SEC Chair Jay Clayton discussed the SEC’s new Chief Risk Officer position, its incident response procedures, and its ongoing internal investigation of last fall’s high-profile Edgar hack.

– Liz Dunshee