Tag: SEC Division of Enforcement
SEC Enforcement’s “EPS Initiative” chalks up another one
Last week, the SEC announced settled charges against Gentex Corporation, a manufacturer of digital vision, connected car, dimmable glass and fire protection products, and its former Chief Accounting Officer and current CFO, Kevin Nash, related to financial reporting, books-and-records and internal accounting controls violations. Allegedly, these violations were the consequence of deficiencies in the company’s accounting practices for its bonus programs, which practices allowed the company to manage its earnings by adjusting its accruals for bonuses to ensure that publicly reported EPS was in line with consensus EPS estimates—without the required accounting analysis or adequate supporting documentation. According to the SEC, had the company not reduced the accrual for bonuses, it “would have missed consensus EPS estimates by one penny.” Gentex was ordered to pay a civil money penalty of $4 million and Nash to pay $75,000. These charges represent yet another case resulting from SEC Enforcement’s “Earnings-Per-Share Initiative,” which applies risk-based data analytics to detect potential violations from earnings management, among other things.
Workplace misconduct again! SEC charges failure of disclosure controls
Alleged workplace misconduct—and the obligation to collect information and report up about it—rears its head again in yet another case, this time involving Activision Blizzard, Inc. Just last month, in In re McDonald’s Corporation, the former “Chief People Officer” of McDonald’s Corporation was alleged to have breached his fiduciary duty of oversight by consciously ignoring red flags about sexual harassment and misconduct in the workplace. According to the court in that case, the defendant “had an obligation to make a good faith effort to put in place reasonable information systems so that he obtained the information necessary to do his job and report to the CEO and the board, and he could not consciously ignore red flags indicating that the corporation was going to suffer harm.” (See this PubCo post.) Now, the SEC has issued an Order in connection with a settled action alleging that Activision Blizzard, Inc., a videogame developer and publisher, violated the Exchange Act’s disclosure controls rule because it “lacked controls and procedures designed to ensure that information related to employee complaints of workplace misconduct would be communicated to Activision Blizzard’s disclosure personnel to allow for timely assessment on its disclosures.” In addition, the SEC alleged that the company violated the whistleblower protection rules by requiring, in separation agreements, that former employees “notify the company if they received a request from a government administrative agency in connection with a report or complaint.” As a result, Activision Blizzard agreed to pay a $35 million civil penalty. These cases suggest that company actions (or lack thereof) around workplace misconduct and information gathering and reporting about it have resonance far beyond employment law. It’s also noteworthy that this Order represents yet another case (see this PubCo post) where a “control failure” is a lever used by SEC Enforcement to bring charges against a company notwithstanding the absence of any specific allegations of material misrepresentation or misleading disclosure, a point underscored by Commissioner Hester Peirce in her dissenting statement, discussed below.
SEC settles charges with McDonald’s and former CEO over deficient disclosures; two commissioners dissent
Inappropriate relationships with employees have landed a number of CEOs and other executives in hot water in the last few years, especially as the MeToo movement gained momentum. But these aren’t necessarily just employment issues, nor are they always limited to problems for the perpetrator. The SEC has just announced settled charges against McDonald’s and its former CEO, Stephen Easterbrook, arising out of the termination of Easterbrook “for exercising poor judgment and engaging in an inappropriate personal relationship with a McDonald’s employee in violation of company policy.” The SEC alleged that Easterbrook made “false and misleading statements to investors about the circumstances leading to his termination in November 2019.” But how was McDonald’s alleged to have violated the securities laws? The SEC charged that McDonald’s disclosures related to Easterbrook’s separation agreement were deficient in failing to disclose that the company “exercised discretion in terminating Easterbrook ‘without cause,’” allowing Easterbrook to “retain substantial equity compensation.” The SEC’s Director of Enforcement asserted that, “[w]hen corporate officers corrupt internal processes to manage their personal reputations or line their own pockets, they breach their fundamental duties to shareholders, who are entitled to transparency and fair dealing from executives….By allegedly concealing the extent of his misconduct during the company’s internal investigation, Easterbrook broke that trust with—and ultimately misled—shareholders.” According to the Associate Director of Enforcement, “[p]ublic issuers, like McDonalds’s, are required to disclose and explain all material elements of their CEO’s compensation, including factors regarding any separation agreements….Today’s order finds that McDonald’s failed to disclose that the company exercised discretion in treating Easterbrook’s termination as without cause in conjunction with the execution of a separation agreement valued at more than $40 million.” As reported by the WSJ, “[i]n a statement Monday, McDonald’s said, ‘The SEC’s order reinforces what we have previously said: McDonald’s held Steve Easterbrook accountable for his misconduct. We fired him, and then sued him upon learning that he lied about his behavior.’” Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda dissented from the Order, contending that the SEC’s interpretation of the disclosure rule was beyond the rule’s scope.
AT&T settles Reg FD charges for record penalty
Yesterday, the SEC announced that it had settled charges against AT&T for alleged violations of Reg FD for $6.25 million, an amount that it characterized as a “record penalty”—the “largest ever in a Reg FD case.” The case involved allegations of one-on-one disclosures by three company executives of AT&T’s “projected and actual financial results” to a number of Wall Street research analysts in violation of Reg FD and Exchange Act 13(a). (See this PubCo post.) The three executives agreed to pay $25,000 each to settle charges. After the federal district court for the SDNY denied summary judgment for both sides in September (see this PubCo post), the case appeared to be on its way to trial, but that was headed off by this new settlement. According to Gurbir Grewal, Director of Enforcement, the “actions allegedly taken by AT&T executives to avoid falling short of analysts’ projections are precisely the type of conduct Regulation FD was designed to prevent….Compliance with Regulation FD ensures that issuers publicly disclose material information to the entire market and not just to select analysts.”
SEC and DOJ conducting Rule 10b5-1 probe
As the SEC mulls its 10b5-1 proposal (see this PubCo post), neither its Enforcement Division nor the DOJ are waiting around to see what happens. According to Bloomberg, they are using data analytics “in a sweeping examination of preplanned equity sales by C-suite officials.” The question is whether executives “been gaming prearranged stock-sale programs designed to thwart the possibility of insider trading”? Of course, there have been countless studies and “exposés” of alleged 10b5-1 abuse over the years, the most recent being this front-page analysis of trading by insiders under Rule 10b5-1 plans in the WSJ (see this PubCo post). While these concerns have been percolating for quite some time, no legislation or rules have yet been adopted (although several bills have been introduced and the SEC proposed new regs at the end of 2021). Bloomberg reports that these investigations by Enforcement and the DOJ are consistent with the recent “tougher line on long-standing Wall Street trading practices during the Biden era. Federal officials requested information from executives early this year, said one person. They’re now preparing to bring multiple cases, said two other people.”
SEC reports Enforcement stats—the “risk-reward calculation is not what it was”
The SEC has announced its fiscal 2022 Enforcement stats, which hit new records. According to the press release, during the year, the SEC filed 760 total enforcement actions, representing a 9% increase over the prior year. That total included 462 new, or “stand-alone,” enforcement actions, which “ran the gamut of conduct, from ‘first-of-their-kind’ actions to cases charging traditional securities law violations.” The SEC also recovered a record $6.4 billion in civil penalties, disgorgement and pre-judgment interest in SEC actions, an increase of 68% from $3.8 billion in the prior year. Civil penalties, at $4.2 billion, were also the highest on record. The press release emphasized that the increase in penalties is intended to “deter future misconduct and enhance public accountability.” In a number of cases, the SEC “recalibrated penalties for certain violations, included prophylactic remedies, and required admissions where appropriate” to make “clear that the fines were not just a cost of doing business.” According to Director of Enforcement Gurbir Grewal, the SEC doesn’t “expect to break these records and set new ones each year because we expect behaviors to change. We expect compliance.” Interestingly, disgorgement, at $2.2 billion, declined 6% from last year. As reported by the WSJ, Grewal, speaking at a recent conference, highlighted the fact that the SEC imposed more penalties than disgorgements, which, in his view, “demonstrated that ‘the potential consequences of violating the law are significantly greater than the potential rewards.’… He added that the SEC ordered more than twice as much in disgorgements as it did in penalties for the five fiscal years before the last one. ‘So while disgorgement was slightly down from the prior year…it is the first time that the amount ordered to be paid in penalties has been double the amount ordered to be paid in disgorgement,’ he said. ‘The increased penalty-to-disgorgement ratio nonetheless demonstrates that the risk-reward calculation is not what it was even a few years ago.’”
SEC charges Compass Minerals with disclosure violations resulting from “deficient disclosure process”
Toward the end of last month, the SEC announced settled charges against Compass Minerals International, Inc., for alleged disclosure violations that were “the consequence of a deficient disclosure process.” In the Order, the SEC alleged that Compass misrepresented the impact of a technology upgrade at its Goderich mine—the world’s largest underground salt mine—which the company had claimed would lead to cost savings, but actually led to increased costs and below-expectation results. Central to the case, however, was the purported failure of the company’s disclosure controls that resulted in the misleading statements: “statements to investors were not reviewed by personnel who were sufficiently knowledgeable about both Compass’s operations and its disclosure obligations.” The company was also charged with failing to disclose the potential financial risks arising out of the company’s contamination of a river in Brazil with excessive discharges of mercury, a failure the SEC also attributed to inadequate disclosure controls. According to Melissa Hodgman, Associate Director of the Division of Enforcement, “[w]hat companies say to investors must be consistent with what they know. Yet Compass repeatedly made public statements that did not jibe with the facts on—or under—the ground at Goderich….By misleading investors about mining costs in Canada and failing to analyze the potential financial consequences of its environmental contamination in Brazil, Compass fell far short of what the federal securities laws require.” Compass agreed to pay $12 million to settle the charges.
The “737 MAX is as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies”— Boeing settles antifraud charges with SEC
In a kind of sad coda to the litany of claims, charges, investigations and litigation surrounding the tragic crashes in 2018 and 2019 of two Boeing 737 MAX airplanes and the heartbreaking deaths of 346 passengers, the SEC announced last week, as discussed in this Order, that the Boeing Company had agreed to pay $200 million to settle charges that it made materially misleading statements following the crashes, including statements assuring the public that the 737 MAX airplane was “as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies.” (As discussed in this order, the CEO will pay $1 million to settle charges.) Of course, that settlement pales against the $2.5 billion settlement agreed on last year with Department of Justice to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the FAA in connection with the FAA’s evaluation of the Boeing’s 737 MAX airplane. Also last year, as reported by the NYT, Boeing’s directors reached a $237.5 million settlement of Caremark claims filed in Delaware, which asserted that, as a result of the directors’ “complete failure to establish a reporting system for airplane safety,” and “their turning a blind eye to a red flag representing airplane safety problems,” the board consciously breached its fiduciary duty and violated corporate responsibilities and, as a result, should bear some responsibility for Boeing’s losses. (For a discussion of that case, see this PubCo post.) According to SEC Chair Gary Gensler, “[t]here are no words to describe the tragic loss of life brought about by these two airplane crashes….In times of crisis and tragedy, it is especially important that public companies and executives provide full, fair, and truthful disclosures to the markets. The Boeing Company and its former CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, failed in this most basic obligation. They misled investors by providing assurances about the safety of the 737 MAX, despite knowing about serious safety concerns. The SEC remains committed to rooting out misconduct when public companies and their executives fail to fulfill their fundamental obligations to the investing public.” How do these things happen? The facts of the Boeing case may be instructive.
SEC charges executives with insider trading— purported 10b5-1 plan provided no defense
It may look like just another run-of-the-mill insider trading case, but there’s one difference in this settled SEC Enforcement action: according to the SEC, it involved sales under a purported 10b5-1 trading plan entered into while in possession of material nonpublic information. As you probably know, to be effective in insulating an insider from potential insider trading liability, the 10b5-1 plan must be established when the insider is acting in good faith and not aware of MNPI. Creating the plan when the insider has just learned of MNPI, as alleged in this Order, well, kinda defeats the whole purpose of the rule. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, and the two executives involved here—the CEO and President/CTO of Cheetah Mobile—found that out the hard way, with civil penalties of $556,580 and $200,254. The company’s CEO was also charged with playing a role in the company’s misleading statements and disclosure failures surrounding a material negative revenue trend. According to the Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Market Abuse Unit in this press release, “[w]hile trading pursuant to 10b5-1 plans can shield employees from insider trading liability under certain circumstances, these executives’ plan did not comply with the securities laws because they were in possession of material nonpublic information when they entered into it.”
VMware charged with failure to disclose “backlog management practices”
Last week, the SEC brought a settled action against VMware, a provider of cloud-storage software and services, alleging that it misled shareholders by failing to disclose material information about its “managed pipeline” of orders in quarterly and annual Exchange Act reports, on earnings calls and in earnings releases during its 2019 and 2020 fiscal years. According to the press release, the company used its “backlog management practices” to “push revenue into future quarters by delaying product deliveries to customers, concealing the company’s slowing performance relative to its projections.” Interestingly, the charges in the SEC’s Order were not about funny accounting or even that favorite Enforcement standby, failure to maintain and comply with adequate disclosure controls and procedures. As VMware noted in a statement, the “SEC’s findings do not include any findings that the Company failed to comply with generally accepted accounting principles.” Rather, the charges were about the disclosures about the accounting. “Although VMware publicly disclosed that its backlog was ‘managed based upon multiple considerations,’” the SEC said, “it did not reveal to investors that it used the backlog to manage the timing of the company’s revenue recognition.” VMware was ordered to cease and desist and pay a civil penalty of $8 million. According to an Associate Director in the Division of Enforcement, “by making misleading statements about order management practices, VMware deprived investors of important information about its financial performance….Such conduct is incompatible with an issuer’s disclosure obligations under the federal securities laws.”
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