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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

The SEC is, largely, a powerless bogeyman due to chronic underfunding and lack of staff. Another wonderful feature of corporate regulatory capture in the US.

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But what kind of staff or funding does it take to say literally different words out of your mouth like, you are fined $5B instead of $5MM? I can do that for free, especially if they are already at the point where they are making the charge. Every fine should be devastating so that they either barely survive or die, and every other company shits themselves for life and we solve the problem.

Hence the phrase "regulatory capture" which describes a system in which unelected bureaucrats are not given life-and-death power over companies, but the people who set the rules are wholly captured by the regulated companies so the rules are made weak.

Thanks for the definition

>But what kind of staff or funding does it take to say literally different words out of your mouth like, you are fined $5B instead of $5MM?

Because we don't live in an autocracy, and government fines can (and are) successfully challenged in court. It takes an immensely greater effort, and immensely greater resources, to enforce a $5B fine vs a $5M fine.

How do you get away with defending tax fraud to the point where the fine is pointless? Does the SEC not get to keep the winnings to use for their future cases so they can hire a ton of lawyers? I guess the real problem is why are judges (presumably everywhere?) lettings companies and organizations get away with this or is there a specific set of judges that only handle SEC cases? Perhaps the first step to getting bigger fines is to just keep increasing fines across the board? Do they need to campaign to judges to remind them that financial crime is bad? How hard is it for anyone to understand that a fine is meaningless unless it hurts, no matter how big the number is? Do you really need more lawyers to prove that basic point? I guess you guys are stuck in a pretty crappy system, but then again I'm sure most places are :/

The piece you are missing is that the $5M figure is not what the SEC "decided," because this was a mutually-agreed settlement, not an SEC-dictated fine. A low figure is not a sign that the SEC is asleep at the wheel so much as a signal of their confidence about taking it to trial.

The lawyers to back it up. Fines and judgements are subject to judicial review.

I guess it just seems strange that if their job is to essentially take wrong-doers to court and win loads of money, even if those winnings are relatively small compared to what they should be, they would still both have a lot of lawyers on staff and a lot of money coming in (regardless of funding from the government) to pay for those lawyers and the more they fine, the more money they'd have to hire more lawyers? And they have no shortage of cases with no competitors? I get they are probably bogged down in infinite politically and bureaucratic BS, but still, seems like they should have an easy path to winning without asking for funding from anyone.

Its a settlement, so its based on the church's assessment of the strength and resources of the SEC

So you need more staff to write down a larger fine on a piece of paper?

You need the staff to enforce it...

fine = scale of crime x (number of ppl working at SEC/1000000)

…yes? Because with larger fines comes larger court cases - and larger numbers of support staff.

Corporations have lobbied and purchased their way into these freedoms at the cost of our wallets and futures.

Don’t play thick. I too wish these assholes got prison time for this behavior.

How many bureaucrats does it take to type a zero on a fine?

In all seriousness, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and I love the SEC.

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