The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) recently issued its annual enforcement report, which analyzes enforcement patterns and emerging priorities in the fiscal year (“FY”) ending September 30, 2021. Challenges born in 2020 persisted as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to upset the status quo: the SEC reported filing 697 total actions for the year — down 3 percent from FY 2020 and down 19 percent from FY 2019. But standalone actions – new actions not tied to other matters – were up slightly in 2021: 434 standalone actions were filed in 2022 as compared to 405 actions in 2020.

In addition, the SEC ordered a total of $1.45 billion in fines, a 33% increase over the $1.09 billion in fines ordered in 2020. And perhaps not surprisingly, the SEC ordered almost 33% less in disgorgement in 2021, almost certainly as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Liu decision last year, which limited disgorgement to a wrongdoer’s net profits. Money distributed to harmed investors was down nearly 50 percent at $602 million, the lowest since FY 2016. At the same time, the SEC boasted a record year for its whistleblower program, awarding a total of $564 million to 108 whistleblowers and surpassing $1 billion in awards over the life of the SEC’s whistleblower program. The two highest whistleblower awards amounted to $114 and $110 million.

The Director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division, Gurbir S. Grewal, alluded to ongoing COVID-19 pandemic-related obstacles and noted that FY 2021 featured “...

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