Statement Summary
The SEC announced its enforcement results for fiscal year 2025, emphasizing a strategic shift towards prioritizing cases that mainly protect investors and uphold market integrity. The Commission filed 456 enforcement actions, recovering $17.9 billion in monetary relief, focusing on serious misconduct such as fraud, market manipulation, and insider trading. Chairman Paul Atkins highlighted the need to pivot from quantity-driven to quality-driven enforcement, ensuring resources are allocated effectively. The SEC aims to hold individual violators accountable and engage in proactive measures against transnational fraud, particularly involving emerging technologies like cryptocurrencies. This year, the Commission also returned approximately $262 million to harmed investors and recognized a record number of whistleblower tips, underscoring its commitment to investor protection.
Fiscal Year 2025 Results & Supporting Context
During fiscal year 2025, the Commission filed 456 enforcement actions, including 303 standalone actions and 69 “follow-on” administrative proceedings seeking to bar or suspend individuals from certain functions in the securities markets based on criminal convictions, civil injunctions, or other orders, and obtaining orders for monetary relief totaling $17.9 billion. These enforcement actions addressing a broad range of misconduct demonstrate the Commission’s prioritization of cases that directly harm investors and the integrity of the U.S. securities markets, including offering frauds, market manipulation, insider trading, issuer disclosure violations, and breaches of fiduciary duty by investment advisers.
The results do not include the 1,095 matters in which potentially violative conduct was investigated and which were closed, the several matters where market participants remediated their practices, or cases that were otherwise not pursued.
FY 2025 was a unique period of transition for the enforcement division never experienced before in modern SEC history. It was characterized by an unprecedented rush to bring a significant number of cases in advance of the presidential inauguration and the aggressive pursuit of novel legal theories under the prior Commission. This period brought about the current Commission’s resolution of prior cases that were not sufficiently grounded in the federal securities laws. The current Commission deliberately refocused the enforcement program on matters of fraud—cases that inherently require more time and resources to develop and bring, often requiring up to two or more years to manifest results.
Since fiscal year 2022, the prior Commission brought 95 actions and $2.3 billion in penalties against firms for book-and-record violations, specifically failing to maintain and preserve off-channel communications. Together with seven crypto firm registration-related and six ‘definition of a dealer’ cases, these cases identified no direct investor harm from those violations, produced no investor benefit or protection, and demonstrate what the current Commission views as a misinterpretation of the federal securities laws, a misallocation of Commission resources, and a bias for volume of cases brought versus matters of investor protection.
This year’s enforcement results clarify the flaws of these actions and their respective penalties and re-establish the definition and measure of enforcement effectiveness, grounded in Congress’s original intent and focused on bringing actions that actually prevent investor harm instead of headlines and inflated numbers.
Future Enforcement Priorities
Going forward, enforcement priorities and results will be linked to the Commission’s and the Division’s core mandate, and will thus contemplate the following elements to fulfill its mission:
- Standing up to fraud in its many forms and those market participants engaged in such misconduct;
- Addressing the fraudulent and manipulative conduct of the parties in question through appropriate remediation;
- Repaying investors’ losses when harmed.
“Over the past year, the Commission has put a stop to regulation by enforcement and recentered its enforcement program on the Commission’s core mission by prioritizing cases that provide meaningful investor protection and strengthen market integrity,” said SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins.
“I fully support the move away from using enforcement as a tool for policymaking, and the return to the Commission’s historical norms,” said SEC Commissioner Mark T. Uyeda.
Protecting Retail Investors
The fiscal year 2025 enforcement results demonstrate the Commission’s focus on protecting the interests of retail investors, who may be particularly vulnerable to securities fraud, while prioritizing identifying and remedying fraudulent conduct. The Division devoted significant resources to this critical area in fiscal year 2025 and brought actions to address conduct involving fraudsters who targeted veterans, seniors, and members of a religious community.
Holding Individual Wrongdoers Accountable
In fiscal year 2025, the Commission prioritized charging individuals for violating federal securities laws and will continue to do so. Of the standalone actions filed during this past fiscal year, approximately two-thirds involved charges against one or more individual bad actors (a 27 percent year-over-year increase), and nearly nine out of every 10 standalone actions filed under Acting Chairman Uyeda and Chairman Atkins involved individual charges. The Commission also obtained orders barring 119 individuals from serving as officers and directors of public companies.
Holding individual wrongdoers accountable benefits the investing public by seeking to provide specific and general deterrence, and, particularly where injunctive and other non-monetary remedies are imposed, protecting markets and investors from future misconduct by those same bad actors.
Combatting Securities Fraud
The Commission continued to pursue enforcement actions involving potential market manipulation, such as account takeover and “pump-and-dump” or “ramp-and-dump” schemes involving foreign-based companies and gatekeepers. In September 2025, the Commission formed the Cross-Border Task Force to help address the serious threat that fraudsters located abroad pose to U.S. investors and markets.
Safeguarding Markets from Abusive Trading
Central to the Commission’s enforcement efforts are detecting and deterring market abuses, including insider trading, market manipulation, and myriad other practices that interfere with fair, orderly, and efficient markets. In fiscal year 2025, the Commission brought a number of actions covering a wide range of abusive trading practices.
Deploying Resources Judiciously as to Emerging Technologies
In fiscal year 2025, the Commission made a necessary course correction in its approach to enforcing the federal securities laws in the context of crypto assets. The Division remains committed to detecting, deterring, and bringing actions against those seeking to take advantage of investors by misusing new technologies.
Conclusion
During fiscal year 2025, the SEC has demonstrated a renewed commitment to investor protection and market integrity through its enforcement actions, focusing on serious misconduct and holding individual violators accountable.
