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Today Congressman Bill Posey (R-Rockledge) was joined by 20 of his House colleagues in writing to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairwoman Mary Schapiro expressing strong opposition to a recent vote by the SEC to impose dubious climate change disclosure requirements on publicly traded companies.
 
“First and foremost, the SEC’s primary focus should be doing a better job of protecting investors from fraud and abuse,” said Congressman Posey. “We’ve seen a number of very expensive, high profile financial scandals in recent years that the SEC failed to detect, and now the SEC wants to divert resources toward climate change regulation? As of yet, there has still been no accountability at the SEC for these colossal failures.” 
 
“I am also concerned that the SEC is implementing this mandate without the consideration of Congress or through the normal rule-making process,” added Posey.  “It is also particularly worrisome to impose these costly mandates as the economy continues to struggle to recover from recession.”
 
While the SEC has had the long standing authority to impose environmental risk requirements on companies, to date there are no federal laws explicitly addressing climate change and it’s uncertain how a company would measure its own climate change impact when much of the science is increasingly uncertain.
 
For almost ten years, the SEC had ignored overwhelming evidence that now convicted investor Bernie Madoff was running history’s largest Ponzi scheme worth over $65 billion. It wasn’t until everything came crashing down that Madoff was charged and convicted despite evidence that private investors were suspicious as early as 1991 of Madoff's methods. Posey said it’s still unclear as to why the SEC didn’t move years earlier to investigate Madoff after having all of the evidence handed to them by investigator Harry Markopolos.
 
Last October, Posey introduced the SEC Delinquent Judgment Act, legislation to refocus the Securities Exchange Commission on uncovering and hunting down those who commit securities fraud.  More specifically, Posey’s bill authorizes the agency to contract for collections operations freeing up more personnel and resources to prevent fraud and detect it years earlier.

Read the Letter HERE.