HR-5429 : Still Just a Bill

SEC Regulatory Accountability Act

This bill amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to direct the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), before issuing a regulation under the securities laws, to:

• identify the nature and source of the problem that the proposed regulation is designed to address in order to assess whether any new regulation is warranted;
• use the SEC Chief Economist to assess the costs and benefits of the intended regulation and adopt it only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify the costs;
• identify and assess available alternatives that were considered; and
• ensure that any regulation is accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand.

The SEC shall:

• consider the impact of the regulation upon investor choice, market liquidity, and small business; and
• explain in its final rule the nature of comments received concerning the proposed rule or rule change as well as its response to those comments.

The SEC shall: (1) review its existing regulations periodically to determine if they are outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome; and (2) modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them.

Whenever it adopts or amends a major rule, the SEC shall state in its adopting release the regulation's purposes and intended consequences, the post-implementation quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure the regulation's economic impact, the assessment plan to be used under the supervision of the Chief Economist to assess whether the regulation has achieved those purposes, and any foreseeable unintended or negative consequences.

The assessment plan must: (1) consider the regulation's costs, benefits, and intended and unintended consequences; and (2) specify the data to be collected, the methods for its collection and analysis, and an assessment completion date.

The bill expresses the sense of Congress that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board should also follow the requirements set forth by this bill.