Over 99% of Federal Reserve Bank Enforcement Actions Are Resolved Without Admission of Guilt

Posted: 22 May 2012 09:56 PM PDT

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.  You can follow him on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller
In a hearing last week titled “Examining the Settlement Practices of U.S. Financial Regulators”, various regulators tried to justify their practice of settling with financial firms and not requiring them to admit wrongdoing. In that hearing, Federal Reserve General Counsel Scott Alvarez, stated that only seven of the roughly one thousand enforcement actions taken in the last decade were resolved without consent.

The vast majority of the Federa Reserve’s formal enforcement actions are resolved upon consent, which is fully consistent with the goal of resolving supervisory concerns with bank management quickly and firmly. In crafting enforcement actions that are entered by consent, the Federal Reserve typically sets out summary recitations of the relevant facts in “Whereas” clause provisions; however, like our fellow banking regulators, it has not been our practice to require formal admissions to the misconduct addressed in our enforcement orders given the remedial nature of our enforcement program. Requiring admission of fact and legal conclusions as a condition of entering into a consent action is likely to have a deleterious effect on our supervisory efforts by causing more institutions and individuals to challenge the requested relief in contested administrative proceedings, which typically takes years to reach final resolution, and which could delay implemenattion of necessary corrective action.

In other words, the Federal Reserve will only punish banks who break the rules if those banks consent to punishment.  This attitude is pervasive among all regulators.  Here’s the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates among other banks JP Morgan Chase.

Obtaining an institution’s consent to an immediately effective order helps ensure that its problems are addressed at a stage when rehabilitation is still possible, thus helping the bank avoid failure…
The longstanding practice of permitting the bank or individual to neither admit nor deny wrongdoing allows the OCC to get an enforceable order in place at an early stage of the proceeding, and encourages compliance with the enforcement action and immediate correction of any deficiencies that need to be addressed. Because consent orders are made available to the public, requiring an admission of wrongdoing would prolong settlement negotiations and increase the number of respondents who choose to litigate the merits of the action.

Of all the regulators testifying, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement chief, Robert Khuzami, was the most embarrassing, announcing the SEC would be making a change to its practice of not forcing corporate actors to admit wrongdoing.

In light in the special situation where an SEC civil action may also involve a parallel criminal action, senior officials in the Division of Enforcement recently undertook a review of the “neither-admit-nor-deny” settlement policy. While reaffirming the policy more generally, as a result of this review, the Division, after consulting with the Commission, modified its policy to eliminate “neither-admit-nor-deny” language that could be construed as inconsistent with admissions or findings made in a parallel criminal proceeding.  In other words, it seemed unwarranted for there to be a “neither-admit-nor-deny” provision in those cases where a defendant had already admitted to, or been criminally convicted of, conduct that formed the basis of a parallel civil enforcement proceeding.

In other words, if the company has already admitted guilt in a criminal proceeding, where the evidence required is usually much heavier, then the SEC will ask the company to admit guilt in a civil proceeding.  Khuzami spent most of the hearing talking about how the SEC was getting most of what it wanted out of these settlements, anyway, without an admission of guilt.  This is, of course, nonsense.  I pinged Bill Black about why it’s important to make companies admit wrongdoing, and here’s what he said.

(1)  It demonstrates that what has occurred was a fraud (otherwise they deny it after the fact and insist they were simply being extorted), (2) the plea of guilty (as opposed to nolo contender) can be used by civil plaintiffs (and in administrative enforcement actions) to invoke “collateral estoppel.””  The defendant is estopped from denying their guilt in the civil action.  This makes it immensely easier for victims to recover, (3) offenders, particularly multiple offenders, are treated differently under the laws and rules.  The pleas can be used under RICO to establish a pattern of racketeering, under the sentencing guidelines to secure a tougher prison sentence, and to argue in favor of punitive damages and asset freeze orders.

The hearing was about District Court Judge Jed Rakoff’s refusal to sustain the Citigroup settlement with the SEC.  What was interesting about it, from a political standpoint, is that all three witnesses, including the witness brought in by the Democrats, opposed Rakoff’s move and supported the SEC’s position.  And one of the top Democrats on the committee, Carolyn Maloney, gave a long-winded opening statement in which she basically took the position that forcing an admission of wrongdoing was just too hard.  In other words, many high-level Democratic politicians, for all their gnashing of teeth about the need for regulation, aren’t being truthful.  They don’t want regulation, they want to be seen as wanting regulation.  And the Republicans, while they want to be seen as the party against regulation, are actually quite happy having regulators they can work with, regulators who protect the banks from state or local level action.
The argument over regulation or deregulation, in some sense, misses the point.  We need regulation, obviously.  But we also need strongly principled regulators.  And neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney has any appetite for that.