SEC Enforcement Falls to Estimated 308 Cases in Fiscal 2026, Brattle Says

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought an estimated 308 enforcement actions in fiscal 2026, the fewest since at least 2018, according to an estimate published Tuesday by The Brattle Group. The figure is 57% below the 710 actions the agency averaged annually from fiscal 2018 to 2025, based on SEC annual report data cited by Brattle.

The SEC's fiscal year runs from October to September, and the agency has not yet published its own fiscal 2026 results. Its count for the prior year, published in April, was 456 actions, putting Brattle's new estimate about a third lower.

SEC enforcement: Uneven Filing Pace and a September Surge

Brattle counted 93 actions in the first half of the fiscal year and 215 in the second, including 99 in September alone. September is typically the busiest month, but this year it accounted for 32.1% of the total, compared with a historical share of 26.6%.

Jan Jindra, a principal at Brattle and a former assistant director at the SEC, said second-half filings rose sharply but "the annual total remained far below historical levels." Brattle linked the slow start to persistently low staffing and the government shutdown that ran from October 1 to November 12, 2025, the longest in US history. Even the second-half total was the second-lowest in Brattle's data, ahead only of the 144 actions filed in the same period of fiscal 2025.

The SEC's Enforcement Division also changed leadership. Margaret Ryan resigned as director in March, and David Woodcock, who ran the SEC's Fort Worth office from 2011 to 2015, took over in May. The agency revised its Enforcement Manual and Wells process in February. Chairman Paul Atkins has steered the agency toward fraud cases, saying his predecessor's SEC "would shoot first and then ask questions later." A draft agency plan released in June would tie enforcement to "policing fraud and manipulation" and move away from cases that stretch the agency's authority.

Broker-Dealer Share Falls to 11%

Broker-dealer cases made up 11.0% of the year's actions, the lowest share in Brattle's data, against 14.3% in fiscal 2025 and an average of 17.8%. In the second half of fiscal 2026, the broker-dealer share was 9.8%. Applied to the full-year total, the 11.0% share works out to about 34 cases, against roughly 65 a year earlier, according to calculations based on Brattle's figures.

The decline came even as the SEC revived a retail fraud working group in July, with a remit covering brokers' breaches of duty to customers alongside offering fraud and pump-and-dump schemes.

Securities offerings and delinquent filings each accounted for 21.4% of actions. Delinquent filings made up 28.8% of second-half cases after 4.3% in the first half. The offering cases included charges filed in December against three purported crypto platforms and four WhatsApp investment clubs, which the SEC said cost investors more than $14 million.

Insider trading reached 12.3% of actions, its highest share since fiscal 2018 and more than double its average. The number of such cases was only about 10% above the 2018-2025 average, Brattle said, so most of the rise in share came from the smaller total.

Criminal Charges in One in Six Cases

SEC releases mentioned a parallel criminal indictment in 7.5% of fiscal 2026 actions, the lowest share in Brattle's data. A search of public court records raised that to 16.9%, or 52 actions, the highest share in its data but a total in line with fiscal 2024 and 2025. Where the SEC's own release did not mention the criminal case, the agency typically filed its civil action 66 days after the indictment, Brattle found.

Adrienna Huffman, a senior associate at Brattle, forecast 350 to 450 actions in fiscal 2027. She said the coming year will show "whether September's pickup develops into a more sustained increase in filings." Brattle expects Woodcock's division to bring more offering fraud, insider trading, market manipulation and investment adviser cases, while expecting a slower result from the Financial Reporting and Accounting Unit, which the SEC set up only in August. Even the top of that forecast range would leave the SEC 260 actions short of its 2018-2025 average.