The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped three stock-options backdating cases in the last week without taking any action. The moves could be an indication that the Commission is cooling off on its enforcement of such cases, according to a report on CFO.com.
“Some of the factors we’ve looked at have been how high up the misconduct goes and how deliberate it appears to be.” –Marc Fagel, SEC
Electronic Arts announced Tuesday that the SEC had dropped its investigation of the video game maker for possible backdating violations. The SEC has also dropped recent cases, including one against NVIDIA Corp., a Santa Clara, Calif.-based maker of graphics cards and consumer electronics, and PMC-Sierra, a semiconductor provider.
“I think the commission made it clear early on that we weren’t planning on filing hundreds of enforcement actions,” Marc Fagel, assistant regional director of the SEC in San Francisco, told CFO.com. “Some of the factors we’ve looked at have been how high up the misconduct goes and how deliberate it appears to be.” He added that the SEC is especially concerned with cases involving forged documents or “egregious facts.”
The number of companies facing SEC probes over backdating, once estimated to be well over 200, is now thought to have fallen below 120, the website reported.