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# What the Docket Shows: SEC Bribery Enforcement Moved Behind Closed Doors, 2010-2026
- URL: https://www.traceoriginresearch.com/the-15-year-quiet-relocation-of-corporate-bribery-enforcement/
- Published: 2026-08-27T18:33:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T15:32:30.000Z
- Author: Eric Brattin
- Tags: United States

<!DOCTYPE html> 

Eric Brattin

Report v2 · Aug 2026 · 19,851 records (SEC EDGAR)

A corrected report from the record · SEC FCPA enforcement, civil and administrative

# The 15-Year Quiet Relocation of Corporate Bribery Enforcement

The SEC still prosecutes foreign bribery. Just not in front of *juries*.

Executive summary

This report presents six findings drawn from a formal ontology of 19,851 SEC enforcement records (1999 to August 2026), covering both federal court civil litigation (10,388 records) and administrative proceedings (9,463 records). Each finding is a structural pattern in the SEC enforcement record that becomes visible only when the full corpus is read as a graph rather than case by case.

The analytical spine · SEC corporate FCPA enforcement moved from federal court to administrative tribunals, 2001–2024

- **Corporate FCPA enforcement has been relocated from federal court to SEC administrative tribunals over a 15-year period**, enabled by Section 929P of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. By 2018 the administrative share of the FCPA docket had exceeded 90 percent, and it has held there ever since, with material accountability consequences across eight procedural dimensions.
- **SEC fraud enforcement rests on one general-purpose statutory theory** (Rule 10b-5 paired with Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act) for the majority of cases, revealing a structural concentration of prosecutorial authority that no aggregate SEC statistic exposes.
- **Violation categories dispose through structurally different pipelines**: Generic Fraud cases proceed to formal charges 39 percent of the time and contested adjudication 14 percent, while FCPA cases settle without admitting fault in 47 percent of cases and have never gone to a contested jury trial in the statute's 47-year history.
- **Nearly half of SEC "settlements" are filed on the same day as the complaint**, meaning the resolution was pre-negotiated before any court process began. These documents are negotiated agreements presented in the form of a lawsuit, not adjudicated findings from one.
- **SEC enforcement is heavily concentrated in a handful of federal districts**, with some (S.D.N.Y., D. Mass., D.N.J.) handling one category almost exclusively while others (C.D. Cal.) show real category diversity.
- **Individual defendant participation differs sharply by violation category**, with FCPA cases involving at least one individual only 30 percent of the time compared to 60 percent for Generic Fraud, the lowest rate among major SEC violation categories.
- **SEC corporate enforcement is concentrated on a small number of large financial institutions**, with the top 20 corporate recidivists dominated by Deutsche Bank Securities (16 enforcement matters), Credit Suisse (14), Merrill Lynch (13), JPMorgan Chase (12), Goldman Sachs (11), and other major intermediaries that appear repeatedly across administrations of both parties.

The FCPA venue-shift finding is the analytical spine of the report. The other five findings are the surrounding evidence that the same methodology produces defensible structural insights across every category of SEC enforcement, not just foreign bribery. Together they support the report's underlying argument: the way SEC enforcement records are currently read systematically hides patterns that shape accountability outcomes, and reading the full record at scale changes what the record shows.

Foreign corporations bribing foreign officials to secure contracts is exactly the pattern the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was written in 1977 to punish. Fifteen years ago the Securities and Exchange Commission brought those cases to federal court: public docket, jury of citizens, generalist Article III judge, full discovery, front-page press coverage when a Fortune 500 company was named as a defendant. Today it brings essentially all of those cases to its own in-house tribunals: no jury, minimal discovery, an SEC-employed judge, first-round appeal back to the SEC itself, and press coverage that most reporters never see because SEC administrative filings sit in a corner of sec.gov that ordinary journalism does not scan. The Wall Street Journal documented that the SEC wins 90 percent of contested cases in its own tribunals compared to 69 percent in federal court. Columbia Law School documented that when the SEC moved a case to the administrative forum, its likelihood of also charging individual executives dropped by roughly a quarter and its likelihood of requiring an independent corporate compliance monitor dropped by two-thirds. This is not a story about SEC enforcement disappearing. It is a story about corporate anti-bribery enforcement being systematically relocated into a forum with less transparency, less discovery, less independence, and empirically weaker accountability outcomes. The relocation was enabled by a specific 2010 statutory change (Section 929P of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which for the first time authorized the SEC to seek monetary penalties in administrative proceedings against non-registered parties). The institutional preference cascade that followed, in which the SEC progressively consolidated nearly all corporate FCPA enforcement into the administrative channel over the next fifteen years, was not itself the subject of public deliberation.

Between 2018 and 2024, the SEC brought approximately 61 corporate FCPA enforcement actions. Nearly all of them were administrative proceedings, not civil lawsuits. Household-name corporate defendants including SAP, RTX, Deere, 3M, Grupo Aval, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Honeywell, Oracle, Goldman Sachs, and dozens more resolved substantial foreign-bribery allegations through this channel. Meanwhile the SEC filed only a handful of new corporate FCPA matters in federal court over the same seven-year window, and only three FCPA-related actions against individual defendants across the period 2020 through 2024 (Berko in April 2020, the Batistas in October 2020, and Cabanes in November 2024). On June 27, 2024, the Supreme Court in *SEC v. Jarkesy* ruled that the SEC cannot use its administrative forum for contested fraud cases seeking civil penalties, constraining one narrow slice of the venue. On February 10, 2025, the current administration paused DOJ FCPA enforcement (the SEC channel was formally unaffected), then issued new guidelines in June 2025 refocusing DOJ toward cartel-adjacent cases. Neither event undoes the fifteen-year architectural change this report documents. The Commission is still enforcing the FCPA. It is doing so in a venue that, by every material procedural measure, is not equivalent to the federal court in which corporate FCPA cases used to be brought.

Analysis

E. Brattin

Source data

SEC EDGAR litigation releases and administrative proceedings, 1999–2026

Method

Formal ontology across both enforcement channels, venue-partitioned analysis, cross-reference against FCPA Professor and Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse

Period

1999 to August 2026

19,851

SEC enforcement  
records analyzed

61

Corporate SEC FCPA  
actions 2018–2024

\~90%

Corporate FCPA share  
filed administratively

3

Individual SEC FCPA  
actions 2020–2024

The record

## The SEC did not stop enforcing the FCPA. It *moved* its enforcement.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, enacted in 1977 and jointly administered by the SEC and the Department of Justice, remains fully in force. Between 2018 and 2024, the SEC brought 61 corporate FCPA enforcement actions across both venues. This is not a collapse. It is a moderate decline from the 2007-2013 peak era, which averaged roughly 10 to 18 corporate SEC FCPA actions per year, to a 2018-2024 median in the high single digits. What has substantially narrowed is one specific channel of enforcement: the corporate civil lawsuit filed in federal district court. Nearly all corporate FCPA cases in recent years have been settled in the SEC's administrative tribunals, including SAP, RTX, Deere, 3M, Grupo Aval, Albemarle, KT Corporation, Stericycle, Tenaris, Honeywell, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and many others. The small number of federal court filings during this period included the Cognizant Technology executives (2019), Jerry Li (2019), Asante Berko (2020), and, most recently, Cyril Cabanes in connection with the Adani Group matter (2024). The Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse observes that when the SEC now files a federal court FCPA action, the defendant is almost always an individual; corporate matters are almost uniformly settled administratively.

Two different questions produce two different answers. If the question is "how much SEC corporate FCPA litigation is there in federal court," the honest answer is: very little in recent years, and what remains is largely against individual defendants. If the question is "how much SEC FCPA enforcement is there in total," the honest answer is: substantially less than the 2010 peak but far from zero, and the vast majority of it takes place in the SEC's administrative tribunals. The specialist FCPA community, including FCPA Professor (Mike Koehler), the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse, Global Investigations Review, and Miller & Chevalier's periodic FCPA reviews, tracks enforcement across both venues carefully; what general-audience press coverage of SEC enforcement often does not do is disaggregate by venue, which is where the accountability question becomes visible. The venue shift is the story. Not the volume.

There is also a second finding worth stating plainly. Individual SEC FCPA prosecutions have become rare. Between 2020 and the end of 2024, the SEC brought only three FCPA-related actions against individual defendants: Asante Berko (April 2020, civil action in the Southern District of New York), the Batistas (October 2020, alongside J&F Investimentos and JBS), and Cyril Cabanes (November 2024, part of the Adani matter and the first individual SEC FCPA action in more than four years). Three individual actions in five years, against a corporate settlement pipeline that produced dozens of resolutions in the same period, is a substantial compression of individual accountability.

A third finding, visible directly in the year-by-year data compiled by FCPA Professor and the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse, is that the venue distribution of SEC FCPA enforcement has arced dramatically over 25 years. In the pre-Dodd-Frank period (2001-2010), administrative proceedings routinely accounted for 25 to 60 percent of SEC FCPA actions, with the peak enforcement year (2010) being an outlier weighted heavily toward federal court. After 2010, the SEC's newly expanded administrative-forum authority under Dodd-Frank Section 929P produced a progressive migration: administrative share climbed above 50 percent by 2015 and above 90 percent by 2018, and it has held near 90 to 100 percent every year from 2018 to 2024\. The pattern is not a sudden step function; it is a fifteen-year institutional preference cascade that began before Dodd-Frank was passed, accelerated after the statute expanded administrative-forum penalty authority, and consolidated to near-completion in the second half of the 2010s. It is now the settled institutional practice.

One important qualification. Part of the observed decline in absolute SEC FCPA case volume from the 2007-2013 peak era tracks a structural decline in the population of entities subject to SEC FCPA jurisdiction. The SEC's FCPA authority extends principally to issuers of registered securities, and the number of such issuers has fallen from approximately 7,800 in 2007 to approximately 4,700 today. Some fraction of the volume decline the SEC has experienced across all enforcement categories reflects this shrinking regulatory footprint rather than any change in enforcement priorities. The venue-shift finding this report addresses is independent of volume: whether the SEC brings four corporate FCPA cases a year or fourteen, the question of where those cases are adjudicated is a separate question.

> Between 2020 and 2024, the SEC brought only three FCPA-related actions against individual defendants. In the same period, the corporate settlement pipeline produced dozens of resolutions, nearly all in administrative proceedings. Individual accountability has not disappeared, but it has been substantially compressed.

The pattern

## Fifteen years of migration, one settled institutional *preference.*

The two charts below draw from the year-by-year FCPA enforcement data compiled by FCPA Professor (Mike Koehler) for the pre-2012 era and the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse for the 2015-2024 period, with the SECEO ontology corroborating the venue directionality where its corpus overlaps. The top panel shows raw counts per year, stacked to reveal the venue composition. The bottom panel shows the administrative-proceeding share of the SEC FCPA docket as a percentage, isolating the migration itself. Read together, they make clear two things the current-events framing of FCPA enforcement often misses: administrative proceedings have been a routine venue for SEC FCPA enforcement across the statute's entire modern history, not a post-2015 novelty, and the peak-era 2007-2013 civil-court dominance was itself the anomaly rather than the norm.

SEC FCPA enforcement by year and venue · 2001–2024 · source: FCPA Professor & Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse

Administrative share of the SEC FCPA docket · 2001–2024 · source: FCPA Professor & Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse

The mechanism

## Dodd-Frank enabled the venue shift. The SEC took the *option.*

Before 2010, the SEC's authority to seek monetary penalties in administrative proceedings was limited to parties registered with the Commission (broker-dealers, investment advisers, and other securities professionals). For everyone else, including corporate FCPA defendants, monetary penalties could be sought only in federal court. This created a two-track enforcement architecture the SEC used routinely: file the penalty claim in federal court, and separately institute an administrative proceeding for disgorgement and a cease-and-desist order. The bifurcation was procedurally clumsy but constitutionally uncontested.

Section 929P(a) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, enacted in July 2010, changed this. The provision authorized the SEC to seek civil monetary penalties in administrative proceedings against any party, not just registered securities professionals. From that point forward, the SEC could bring its entire FCPA enforcement mix, including penalties, into a single administrative proceeding. The bifurcation was no longer necessary. The SEC began exercising this expanded option in the years that followed, and progressively consolidated FCPA enforcement into the administrative channel over the course of the following decade.

The venue distribution of SEC FCPA enforcement across the full 25-year record, tracked by FCPA Professor and the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse, shows the shape of the shift. In the pre-Dodd-Frank period (2001-2010), administrative proceedings routinely accounted for 25 to 60 percent of SEC FCPA actions, alongside civil-court cases; the peak enforcement year of 2010 was itself weighted toward federal court (roughly 90 percent civil) but sat within a longer arc in which both forums were used regularly. After Section 929P took effect in 2010, the administrative share climbed progressively across the 2010s, exceeded 50 percent by roughly 2015, and reached and held above 90 percent by 2018\. The pre-Dodd-Frank bifurcated model was not a system in which civil court handled everything; it was a system in which the SEC used both forums for different subsets of cases, with civil court required for cases seeking monetary penalties. Dodd-Frank Section 929P removed that jurisdictional constraint, and over the following decade the SEC exercised its expanded forum discretion progressively rather than abruptly. By 2018 the migration was substantially complete; it has held there ever since.

The accountability differential

## Federal court and SEC tribunals are not procedurally *equivalent.*

The venue shift is not a neutral choice about efficient case management. Federal court and SEC administrative proceedings differ across every material dimension of the adjudicatory process, and those differences systematically favor the SEC. The Wall Street Journal, in an analysis of contested cases from October 2010 through March 2015, found that the SEC prevailed in 90 percent of administrative proceedings compared to 69 percent of federal court trials. Cross-agency studies of federal administrative law courts have found a similar pattern: agencies win approximately 92 percent of cases in their own tribunals versus 55 percent in Article III proceedings. The SEC's preference for its own forum is empirically rational; the question is what the forum choice costs in accountability terms.

The two enforcement paths, side by side

FEDERAL COURT Civil litigation, Article III venue ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEEDING SEC in-house tribunal 1\. FILING Complaint filed on PACER Public docket, indexed by federal courts; media scrutiny standard 1\. INSTITUTION Order filed on sec.gov SEC website only; not indexed by court systems; limited press reach 2\. DISCOVERY Full FRCP discovery Depositions, interrogatories, third-party subpoenas, expert reports, months to years available 2\. DISCOVERY Limited under SEC Rules of Practice Documents SEC already collected; no depositions as of right; typical schedule under 300 days 3\. ADJUDICATION Article III judge; jury available if requested FRE evidence rules, life-tenured judge, jury of citizens for contested penalty claims (post-Jarkesy 2024) 3\. HEARING SEC-employed ALJ; no jury Relaxed evidence rules (hearsay admissible), no jury of any kind in any category 4\. APPEAL Circuit Court of Appeals Independent judicial review; de novo on legal questions; clear-error on findings of fact 4\. APPEAL First to SEC Commission itself Then Circuit Court; agency review is highly deferential to its own ALJ; substantial-evidence standard SEC win rate in contested cases: 69% (WSJ, 2010–2015) SEC win rate in contested cases: 90% (WSJ, 2010–2015) 

### Structural differences between the two SEC enforcement venues

Discovery

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure apply. Depositions, interrogatories, subpoenas, third-party discovery all available. Multi-year timeline typical.

Very limited. No depositions except by leave. SEC turns over investigative file; no equivalent to federal discovery. Maximum four months for discovery under statutory deadlines.

Rules of evidence

Federal Rules of Evidence apply. Hearsay, authentication, and reliability rules constrain admissible evidence.

FRE does not apply. ALJ has broad discretion. Evidence excluded from federal court routinely admitted.

Adjudicator

Article III judge. Life tenure. Senate-confirmed. Constitutionally independent of the executive branch.

SEC administrative law judge. SEC employee. Removable only for cause, with double-layer protection the Fifth Circuit found unconstitutional in *Jarkesy* (not addressed by Supreme Court).

Jury trial

Seventh Amendment right for fraud claims. Jury of the defendant's peers determines facts.

No jury. ALJ determines both law and fact.

First appeal

Direct appeal to Circuit Court of Appeals (Article III).

Initial appeal to the SEC itself, the same body that authorized the enforcement action. Only after SEC review can respondent reach a Circuit Court.

Summary judgment

Rule 56 motions available. Weak claims can be dismissed pre-trial.

Not generally available. All cases proceed to hearing.

Transparency

PACER system. All filings public and searchable. Physical courtrooms. Media access. Verdicts create public precedent.

Filings posted on SEC website. Less prominent placement. Historically closed hearings, later partially opened. Substantially less press coverage per matter.

Empirical win rate

SEC prevailed in 69% of contested trials (WSJ, 2010–2015).

SEC prevailed in 90% of contested proceedings (WSJ, 2010–2015).

One clarification worth making. SEC FCPA enforcement has, to the best knowledge of specialist trackers including FCPA Professor, never actually reached a jury verdict in the statute's history: nearly all corporate FCPA matters settle in both venues, and the small subset of individual FCPA cases has almost always resolved through settlement, consent judgment, or default rather than through a jury trial on the merits. The accountability difference between federal court and the administrative forum is therefore not that juries decided FCPA cases in one and not the other. It is that in federal court the availability of jury trial, along with Article III judicial independence, full discovery under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and public docket access via PACER, structures the negotiating posture under which settlements happen. Move the forum, and you move the shadow of the trial. The venue shift is meaningful because of what the two forums make available to parties who would otherwise contest, not because of what actually gets tried.

Two consequences follow. First, corporate defendants in FCPA cases now overwhelmingly enter into settlement negotiations under the shadow of a forum that historically produces a 90 percent SEC win rate. The negotiating leverage is asymmetric, and the settlement terms reflect the asymmetry. Second, individual defendants, who are less able to absorb settlement costs and more likely to contest charges, find themselves defending in a forum with truncated discovery and limited procedural protections. The empirical result is the pattern documented in Columbia Law School's study of the Dodd-Frank shift: individual accountability rates in SEC corporate cases fell from 74 percent to 56 percent in federal court and from 64 percent to 47 percent in administrative proceedings after Dodd-Frank. Independent consultant requirements in administrative settlements fell from 14 percent to 4 percent. The venue shift correlates with weaker remedial architecture across the board.

> The SEC won 90 percent of contested administrative proceedings and 69 percent of contested federal court trials during the same period. The forum choice is empirically consequential. The forum choice is procedurally consequential. The forum choice is transparency-consequential. It is not neutral.

The constraint

## Jarkesy addressed *one* asymmetry. The others remain in force.

On June 27, 2024, in a 6-3 opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, the Supreme Court held in *SEC v. Jarkesy* that the Seventh Amendment entitles a defendant to a jury trial when the SEC seeks civil monetary penalties for securities fraud, and that such cases must be brought in federal court rather than before an SEC administrative law judge. The Court reasoned that antifraud enforcement resembles common-law fraud, which is a "private right" subject to Seventh Amendment protections, rather than a "public right" (revenue collection, customs, immigration, tribal relations) that Congress may consign to agency adjudication.

The holding is narrower than much of the immediate coverage suggested. Jarkesy addressed one specific procedural asymmetry: the absence of a jury for contested fraud cases seeking penalties. It did not address discovery differences, evidentiary rules, adjudicator independence, appellate structure, summary judgment, or transparency. The DC District Court has twice since Jarkesy (in *Lemelson v. SEC* in late 2024, and *Sztrom* in January 2026) rejected attempts to extend the holding to SEC follow-on administrative proceedings, industry bars, and disgorgement, on the ground that these do not implicate the Seventh Amendment right that Jarkesy vindicated. The SEC's administrative forum remains available for cases the agency settles (in which the respondent waives jury and other rights), for cases seeking only disgorgement or non-monetary sanctions, and for non-fraud enforcement.

For FCPA enforcement specifically, Jarkesy has limited practical effect. Nearly all SEC corporate FCPA cases settle before adjudication, and settled matters do not implicate the Seventh Amendment because there is no fact-finding. The Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse reports that of eight SEC actions filed after Jarkesy, six were filed administratively, and the SEC recovered civil penalties in four of the six. The SEC continues to prefer its own forum wherever legally permissible and continues to secure the same corporate settlements it secured before the ruling. Where Jarkesy will bite, if it bites at all, is in the small subset of FCPA cases involving individual defendants who choose to contest charges rather than settle. Individual FCPA prosecutions have themselves become rare in recent years, and contested individual defenses rarer still, so the practical scope of Jarkesy's constraint on FCPA enforcement is narrow.

The 2025 recalibration

## The 2025 executive order paused *DOJ* FCPA enforcement. Not SEC.

On February 10, 2025, the current administration issued Executive Order 14209, titled "Pausing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement to Further American Economic and National Security." The order directed the Attorney General to suspend new DOJ FCPA investigations and enforcement actions for a 180-day review period, and to issue revised guidelines refocusing FCPA enforcement toward cases involving cartels, transnational criminal organizations, and "substantial" bribery rather than "routine" business practices. Attorney General Bondi's February 5, 2025 memorandum, issued five days before the executive order, had already directed the DOJ FCPA Unit to prioritize cartels and TCOs. On June 9, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Blanche issued the new DOJ FCPA Guidelines, formally ending the pause 71 days before the 180-day deadline.

Executive Order 14209 applied to the Department of Justice. It did not apply to the SEC. Multiple contemporaneous legal analyses confirmed this: the guidelines do not alter any SEC enforcement policies, and on June 3, 2025 SEC Chair Paul Atkins testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that the SEC "has not been directly affected" by the pause. This distinction matters because the DOJ and SEC administer overlapping but distinct portions of the FCPA. DOJ handles criminal enforcement; SEC handles civil enforcement of the accounting and internal-controls provisions applicable to public companies. The 2025 pause narrowed one channel while leaving the other formally intact.

The corrected framing is therefore this. In 2010, Dodd-Frank enabled the SEC to consolidate FCPA enforcement into administrative proceedings. Over the following decade, the SEC did so almost completely. In June 2024, the Supreme Court in Jarkesy constrained one narrow aspect of this forum choice, requiring federal court adjudication for contested fraud claims seeking penalties. In February 2025, the executive branch paused DOJ FCPA enforcement, refocused it on cartel-adjacent bribery, and by June 2025 issued new guidelines that ended the pause. Throughout all of this, the SEC continued to bring FCPA enforcement actions in administrative proceedings. The venue that absorbed the enforcement has been challenged at its edges. It has not been dismantled.

The volume question

## Fewer cases could mean less bribery, or less accountability. The record does not *resolve* which.

The number of SEC corporate FCPA enforcement actions has declined from the 2010 peak, and that decline is real. What it means is a separate question from whether it happened. Two hypotheses fit the data equally well.

Under one reading, the FCPA has worked. Multinational corporations subject to SEC jurisdiction have built substantial compliance infrastructure over the past 25 years, foreign bribery by US-listed issuers has genuinely fallen, and reduced enforcement volume reflects reduced prosecutable conduct. Under this reading, the enforcement decline is a policy success and Congress's original 1977 intent has been substantially fulfilled.

Under a different reading, the FCPA is being under-enforced. Corporate bribery continues at rates similar to earlier periods, but the SEC has structurally deprioritized aggressive corporate prosecution, and the shrinking enforcement pipeline reflects institutional choice rather than reduced conduct. Under this reading, the enforcement decline is an accountability failure and the corporate anti-bribery regime is quietly eroding.

Both hypotheses are consistent with the observed case counts. Enforcement data measures cases brought, not underlying conduct, and no reliable independent measurement of the actual rate of foreign bribery by US-listed corporations exists. The Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse, FCPA Professor, Global Investigations Review, and Miller & Chevalier track what the SEC and DOJ do; they cannot track what corporate conduct does or does not produce grounds for prosecution.

This ambiguity matters for how the report should be read. The venue-shift finding this report documents does not depend on resolving it. Whether the SEC brings four corporate FCPA cases a year or forty, the question of where those cases are adjudicated, and the procedural accountability infrastructure available in each forum, is a separate question independent of volume. The population of SEC-subject issuers has also fallen from roughly 7,800 in 2007 to roughly 4,700 today, which mechanically reduces the case pool independent of any change in enforcement priorities or corporate conduct. All three variables (venue, volume, jurisdiction) move independently and warrant separate examination.

The productive response to the ambiguity is not to pick a hypothesis but to sharpen the questions the enforcement record makes visible. If the compliance-success reading is correct, the accountability question shifts to whether the compliance regime is being independently audited or whether the SEC is relying on corporate self-reporting; whether administrative-forum resolutions still produce sufficient deterrent effect; and whether the compression of individual prosecutions is compatible with continued deterrence at the executive level. If the enforcement-retreat reading is correct, the questions concern what institutional pressures have driven that retreat and what corrective steps, if any, are appropriate. In either case, the venue shift this report documents is a fact about the enforcement infrastructure that should be publicly understood, and the procedural accountability differential between federal court and administrative proceedings applies regardless of which hypothesis is correct.

What follows

## Three consequences worth *naming.*

Consequence 1 · For the accountability infrastructure

The venue shift has moved corporate FCPA enforcement into a forum with less discovery, less transparency, and less press coverage.

The federal court civil docket generates a public record accessible through PACER, subject to media scrutiny, and reviewable by generalist Article III judges applying uniform procedural rules. The SEC administrative docket generates a record on the SEC's own website, reviewed by SEC-employed ALJs applying rules the SEC itself promulgates, and subject to first-level appeal within the SEC. This is not equivalent. The question is not whether the SEC's administrative forum is legal (it is, for cases within Jarkesy's carve-outs) but whether the systematic shift of a major enforcement category into that forum reduces the accountability infrastructure available to journalists, defense counsel, academic researchers, and the public. The answer, on the procedural comparison and on the empirical evidence, is yes.

Consequence 2 · For individual FCPA prosecution

Individual accountability has been substantially compressed.

Between 2020 and the end of 2024, the SEC brought only three FCPA-related actions against individual defendants: Asante Berko (April 2020, civil action in the Southern District of New York for a Ghana bribery scheme), the Batistas (October 2020, filed jointly with J&F Investimentos and JBS), and Cyril Cabanes (November 2024, in connection with the Adani Group matter). Three actions in five years is a compressed pace, particularly against a corporate settlement pipeline that produced dozens of resolutions in the same period. The Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse observes that when the SEC files an FCPA case in federal court in recent years, the case is almost always against an individual rather than a corporation; corporate matters are almost uniformly settled in the administrative channel. The SEC has repeatedly stated its intention to prioritize individual accountability. The empirical record shows a rate substantially below that intention; two to four individual FCPA actions in any given year would represent an increase over the recent pace. Whether the compression reflects reduced enforcement capacity, deliberate deprioritization, the practical difficulty of prosecuting individuals in a forum optimized for corporate settlements, or a compliance-success story in which fewer prosecutable individual cases exist to bring, is a question worth asking of Commission leadership directly. Enforcement volume alone does not resolve it.

Consequence 3 · For the post-Jarkesy trajectory

Jarkesy will bite only where cases contest. Cases that settle continue as before.

Jarkesy's holding applies to contested fraud cases seeking monetary penalties. It does not affect settled matters, disgorgement-only actions, or non-fraud enforcement. Nearly all SEC corporate FCPA cases settle. The forum shift enabled by Dodd-Frank and constrained by Jarkesy has not been undone; it has been narrowed at one edge. Follow-on litigation now working through the lower courts will test other edges (the non-delegation issue the Fifth Circuit raised, the ALJ removal-protection issue Jarkesy declined to reach). If those challenges succeed over the next several years, the SEC's administrative forum for corporate FCPA enforcement could face further constitutional pressure. If they do not, the venue architecture the SEC built after Dodd-Frank remains substantially intact.

**Peer review acknowledgment.** An earlier version of this analysis contained several material errors that were identified after publication by Mike Koehler, whose FCPA Professor website has tracked FCPA enforcement since 2009\. Specifically: the earlier version stated that the SEC had brought zero individual FCPA charges since 2020, which was incorrect; it undercounted pre-2013 administrative FCPA activity, which was substantial rather than near-zero; and it contained an internal contradiction between the lede's "no legislative change" framing and the mechanism section's correct identification of Dodd-Frank Section 929P as the enabling statute. The current version incorporates those corrections. The corrections do not alter the venue-shift finding or the accountability differential the report documents, but they meaningfully change the shape of the temporal arc and the individual-prosecution picture.

Data and reproducibility · What we did, sources, code, caveats 

**Data sources.** We fetched every SEC litigation release published between 1999 and August 2026 from the Commission's own EDGAR system (10,388 documents) and every SEC administrative proceeding record from the same period (9,463 documents), for a combined corpus of 19,851 records. Each record was parsed to extract structured metadata: docket number, respondents, publish date, release scheme, associated file number, statutes cited where available. This produced 17,896 formal allegation records at the (action, statute) level for the litigation-release corpus. The administrative-proceeding corpus was indexed at the metadata level with named-defendant cross-references against the year-by-year counts published by FCPA Professor (Mike Koehler) and the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse.

**FCPA identification.** Civil-litigation FCPA actions were identified by any citation to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 78dd-1 to 78dd-3) or to the accounting and internal-controls provisions in Section 13(b)(2) of the Exchange Act. For the year-by-year FCPA counts and venue distributions cited in this report, we rely on FCPA Professor (Mike Koehler) and the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse as authoritative external sources rather than deriving counts from the SECEO corpus alone, which is metadata-only for the administrative-proceeding channel and materially incomplete relative to those specialist trackers. Year-by-year counts attributed to FCPA Professor are drawn from Mike Koehler's August 2026 correspondence with the author and from published FCPA Professor annual reviews. The SECEO corpus corroborates the direction and general shape of the venue-shift finding but is not the source for the exact year-by-year numbers presented in the two charts above.

**Reproducibility.** The full ontology is expressed in OWL/SKOS and formally validated against SHACL constraints. The complete codebase (ingest, parse, materialize, validate, query, and the administrative-proceedings ingest module) is available for review at [github.com/TruthQuest/sec-eo-graph](https://github.com/TruthQuest/sec-eo-graph/?ref=traceoriginresearch.com). The three RDF/Turtle files (ontology, primary data, shapes) constitute the citable artifact. The venue-shift directionality visible in the two charts above can be corroborated against the SECEO graph via the SPARQL query `seceo_queries.py --query 9`, though the SECEO corpus produces lower absolute counts than the FCPA Professor and Clearinghouse figures because AP ingest completeness is a known v0.2 limitation.

**Caveats.** This analysis covers SEC enforcement only. DOJ criminal FCPA enforcement runs on a parallel track, tracked separately by the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse. The administrative-proceeding corpus is indexed at the metadata level; full-text parsing of the underlying AP order PDFs is deferred and would enable more granular statute-level analysis of that channel.

What else the ontology reveals

## Six findings that only become visible when the record is read at *scale.*

Read together, these six findings describe an SEC enforcement architecture that is more standardized, more privately negotiated, more geographically concentrated, more institutionally repeat-defendant heavy, and more category-differentiated in individual accountability than the case-by-case press coverage of SEC actions conveys. The public sees dozens of individually reported enforcement headlines each year. The full record shows a small number of routinized patterns executing against different corporate defendants. Each finding below names one dimension of that pattern, and each has direct consequences for how journalists, investors, defense counsel, downstream civil plaintiffs, and the general public should interpret what the Commission has actually done.

The FCPA venue shift is one finding among many. The SECEO ontology, applied to the same 19,851-record corpus, surfaces structural patterns across every category of SEC enforcement, not just foreign bribery. Six of them are shown below, each drawn directly from the analytical query portfolio. What each has in common is that no press release, no PACER search, and no aggregate enforcement statistic reveals them; they exist only in the relations between records, and only a formal ontology can make those relations queryable at this scale. The methodological argument this report exists to make is that the way we currently read enforcement records systematically hides patterns that shape accountability outcomes. What follows is a partial catalog of what those patterns look like.

### Finding A · The prosecution bundle

Securities lawyers know that Rule 10b-5 is prosecuted together with Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act in essentially every fraud case. What was not previously quantified is how systematic the bundling is across all statutes: certain pairs co-occur far more often than random chance would predict. The lift statistic (P(A and B) divided by P(A) times P(B)) exceeds 3 for dozens of pairs and reaches 5,000 for the tightest bundles. This is the invisible scaffolding of SEC fraud prosecution: which statutes travel together, at what strength, revealed only because the ontology reifies allegations as first-class entities linked to statutory provisions.

Congress wrote a rich menu of specific antifraud provisions across three securities acts. In practice, the SEC uses one general-purpose provision, Rule 10b-5 paired with Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act, for nearly half of all civil enforcement actions regardless of what the defendant is alleged to have done: insider trading, accounting manipulation, Ponzi schemes, false disclosure. This concentration is a structural constraint on regulatory reach. Novel fraud patterns that do not fit the Rule 10b-5 template are harder for the SEC to charge, and the enforcement docket bends toward what fits the template rather than toward what markets are actually producing. It has never been publicly quantified because it becomes visible only when the entire enforcement record can be read at once.

Statute co-occurrence lift · top 12 pairs by lift value · source: SECEO Query 1

### Finding B · Different violation categories dispose *differently*

Not all SEC violation categories move through the enforcement pipeline the same way. Generic Fraud cases proceed to formal charges 39 percent of the time and consent judgments 29 percent, with only 10 percent settling neither-admitting-nor-denying. FCPA cases invert that pattern: 47 percent settle NANDA, 29 percent produce consent judgments, and only 24 percent proceed to charges. Broker-Dealer Registration cases are 62 percent charged. These are structurally different enforcement regimes hiding under the same "SEC enforcement action" label. The ontology makes them comparable side by side.

The pattern has two-tier consequences that go directly to accountability. Corporate defendants in FCPA cases never have to admit they bribed foreign officials: they pay a fine, sign a document stating they neither admit nor deny wrongdoing, and the case closes. Zero percent of FCPA cases in this corpus went to contested adjudication. Meanwhile Generic Fraud cases, the category that most often involves individual defendants and retail-investor victims, go to contested adjudication 14 percent of the time and produce formal charges 39 percent of the time. Admit-nothing settlements for corporations resolving foreign-bribery matters; contested proceedings for individuals accused of investor fraud. The disposition data shows the split cleanly. No single-case press coverage ever reveals it, because the split is only visible in the aggregate.

Disposition profile by violation category · source: SECEO Query 2

### Finding C · The *zero-day* settlement

When the SEC files a case labeled Settled No-Admit-No-Deny, the median time from complaint filing to disposition is zero days. The settlement is filed with the complaint. There is no litigation, no discovery, no motion practice; the case is complete on arrival. By contrast, cases that go through contested adjudication (LitigatedForSEC) take a median of 656 days, and consent judgments take a median of 770 days. This means the "settlement" category most commonly reported in SEC enforcement statistics is not the endpoint of a resolved dispute; it is a category of resolutions that were pre-negotiated before any court process began. This is not a criticism, but it is a fact about the shape of SEC enforcement that no aggregate statistic surfaces.

The public case file for these settlements is a joint press release, not the record of a legal process. The complaint reads as though it were describing findings the SEC would prove at trial. In reality the complaint was drafted in parallel with the settlement, and both were filed together on the same day. There was no discovery, no motion practice, no adversarial testing of the evidence, no judicial fact-finding. This matters because journalists, investors, downstream civil plaintiffs, and academic researchers routinely treat SEC filings as authoritative accounts of what a defendant did. For a large share of the enforcement docket, that treatment misreads the source. These documents are negotiated settlements presented in the form of a lawsuit, not adjudicated findings from one.

Days from complaint filing to disposition, by disposition type · source: SECEO Query 3

### Finding D · District *specialization*

The SEC's civil docket is heavily concentrated in a handful of federal districts, but the mix of case types varies markedly across them. S.D.N.Y. is 95 percent Generic Fraud. D. Mass. and D.N.J. are each 94 percent. C.D. Cal., by contrast, handles Generic Fraud in only 76 percent of its cases and shows real category diversity across Investment Adviser Fraud, Broker-Dealer Registration, and Proxy Fraud. This is jurisdictional specialization that legal practitioners intuit but that no existing dataset quantifies. Whether the concentration reflects deliberate SEC forum choice, historical case-development patterns, or the geographic distribution of alleged wrongdoing is a question worth investigating; the observation itself is only possible because the ontology joins case records to court venue and to canonical violation categories.

Case-category mix by federal district · top 8 districts by volume · source: SECEO Query 5

### Finding E · Individual accountability differs sharply by *category*

For every enforcement action in the SECEO corpus, the ontology preserves whether at least one respondent is classified as an individual defendant versus a corporate entity. Aggregating across the 25-year record by violation category reveals a pattern the specialist community has intuited but no dataset has directly quantified. Generic Fraud (the SEC's largest enforcement category, 6,281 actions in the corpus) involves at least one individual defendant 60 percent of the time. Officer Certification violations: 59 percent. Broker-Dealer Registration cases: 53 percent. Proxy Fraud: 50 percent. Unregistered Offering: 45 percent. Investment Adviser Fraud: 38 percent. FCPAViolation cases: 30 percent, the lowest rate among major SEC violation categories.

Individual-defendant participation rate by violation category · SECEO corpus 2001–2026 · source: SECEO Query 10

This is a category-specific accountability compression that no external tracker has surfaced. Corporate FCPA defendants are half as likely to have a co-named individual defendant as corporate Generic Fraud defendants. The gap is a factor of two, and it widens in the specific 2018-2024 window that is the focus of this report: FCPA individual-participation rates run 0 percent in 2018, 22 percent in 2019, 14 percent in 2020, 20 percent in 2021, 17 percent in 2022, 0 percent in 2023, and 0 percent in 2024, while Generic Fraud individual-participation has held steady in the 66 to 73 percent range across the same seven years. If declining FCPA volume reflected compliance-driven declines in prosecutable conduct, we would expect individual participation to track corporate participation across all enforcement categories. It does not. What the record shows is a category-specific reduction in individual accountability that tracks the venue-shift architecture: administrative-forum settlements against corporate defendants have become the operational mode; federal-court individual prosecutions are what has been squeezed out.

Interpretive note · jurisdictional scope

Part of the individual-vs-corporate gap in FCPA cases reflects a structural jurisdictional factor rather than a pure enforcement-preference difference. Many FCPA enforcement actions against issuers are based on the conduct of foreign employees at foreign subsidiaries or divisions, over whom the SEC may not have personal jurisdiction even when it has jurisdiction over the parent issuer. Mike Koehler (FCPA Professor) flagged this dimension in correspondence following the corrected version of this report. It is a useful reminder that the raw participation-rate gap and the underlying enforcement architecture are related but distinct questions: the ontology exposes the gap; interpretive expertise about the substance of FCPA prosecution is required to distinguish how much of the gap reflects enforcement choice versus how much reflects the structural reach of SEC authority abroad. Both readings are compatible with the venue-shift finding this report documents; both should inform how the individual-accountability compression is understood.

### Finding F · SEC enforcement is *concentrated* on a handful of large financial institutions

For every corporate respondent in the SECEO corpus, the ontology preserves the count and year distribution of distinct enforcement contacts. Cross-cutting the 25-year record by defendant reveals a concentration pattern that no aggregate SEC dataset makes visible. The corpus contains 1,102 corporate defendants that appear in two or more enforcement actions across the period. The top 20 recidivist defendants are dominated by names any securities lawyer would recognize: Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. (16 enforcement matters between 1998 and 2026), Credit Suisse (14 matters, 2001-2026), Merrill Lynch (13, 1998-2026), JPMorgan Chase (12, 1998-2026), Goldman Sachs (11, 2000-2026), Morgan Stanley (11, 1998-2026), UBS Financial Services (11, 2000-2026), Bear Stearns (10, 1998-2020), Citigroup Global Markets (10, 2003-2024), and Raymond James (10, 1998-2025). The same large financial intermediaries cycle through the SEC enforcement pipeline decade after decade.

Top 20 SEC corporate recidivist defendants · 1998–2026 · source: SECEO Query 12

Two accountability implications follow, both compounding the earlier findings in this report. First, if SEC corporate settlements produced meaningful behavioral change, we would expect corporate defendants to appear once and reform their conduct. Instead, the largest global financial intermediaries appear in the enforcement record repeatedly, through administrations of both parties, across every major violation category the SEC prosecutes. This pattern does not by itself prove that corporate settlements are ineffective, but it raises the question that any serious accountability analysis should raise about the deterrent effect of the SEC's operational enforcement mode. Second, and more pointedly for this report's argument: the venue that most reduces public transparency, discovery, and adversarial testing (the administrative forum) is the same venue in which the SEC now resolves the corporate FCPA matters filed against the same major financial institutions who appear at the top of this recidivism list. Concentrated corporate defendants, repeatedly named, resolved in a forum with less transparency and no independent adjudication, without admitting fault, and with progressively fewer individual co-defendants. The venue-shift finding, the individual-accountability finding, and the corporate-recidivism finding are not three separate patterns. They are three views of the same accountability architecture, each visible only when the enforcement record is read at scale.

These six findings are not the end of what the ontology reveals. They are examples of a class of question that becomes newly answerable when a public record is formalized into a queryable graph. The prosecution-bundling pattern, the disposition-regime differences, the zero-day settlement structure, the district specialization, the category-differentiated individual accountability rates, the concentration of enforcement on a small number of repeat corporate defendants: each of these is a small but real accountability fact that had been invisible until the record could be read at scale. The FCPA finding this report was built around is one such fact, and it does not stand alone. The methodological argument in the next section is what makes them all possible.

The methodological argument · On reading enforcement records at scale

## The wrong corpus can produce an *arithmetically correct* and *analytically wrong* conclusion.

An earlier version of this analysis, drawing on the same underlying ontology but restricting the corpus to SEC civil litigation releases only, concluded that SEC FCPA enforcement had declined 93 percent from its 2010 peak. Every number in that analysis was arithmetically correct within its scope. The 2010 peak of 17 civil litigation actions was accurate. The 2018-2026 civil litigation totals were accurate for the civil channel. The 93 percent decline calculation was arithmetically correct if one accepted the premise that the civil channel represented the whole of SEC FCPA enforcement. The named post-2018 civil defendants (Cognizant, Li, Berko, the Adani matter) were correctly identified within that scope. The conclusion drawn from those numbers, that SEC FCPA enforcement had collapsed, was wrong. The civil channel had narrowed dramatically; the enforcement itself had moved to a different channel.

The reason is structural. The SEC's FCPA enforcement architecture has two channels: civil litigation filed in federal court and administrative proceedings adjudicated within the Commission. Analyzing one channel and describing the result as SEC enforcement is the analytical equivalent of counting oranges in a mixed produce bin and reporting on total fruit inventory. The arithmetic is correct. The scope is wrong. And when the two channels have moved in opposite directions, as they have here since Dodd-Frank in 2010, single-channel analysis will systematically produce false structural conclusions no matter how carefully the numbers within that channel are computed.

Formal ontological analysis is supposed to prevent this class of error, and used carefully, it does. The prior version failed not because the ontology was flawed but because the corpus it was applied to was incomplete. The corrected analysis expands the corpus to include both enforcement channels (19,851 total records), cross-references named defendants against an authoritative external source (the Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse), and partitions the data by venue rather than treating one venue as representative of the whole. Same ontology. Same code. Different corpus scope. Different conclusion, and the different conclusion is the correct one.

The general principle worth stating: enforcement records are meaningful only in relation to the analytical scope in which they are read. A dataset that captures 100 percent of one enforcement channel and 0 percent of an adjacent channel will produce structurally accurate findings about the captured channel and structurally misleading findings about the underlying phenomenon whenever the two channels are substitutes for each other. Verifying corpus completeness is not a courtesy step at the end of an analysis. It is the difference between a defensible finding and a retracted one. This applies to enforcement-record analysis generally, whether the enforcement authority is a securities regulator, a criminal prosecutor, an antitrust agency, or an international tribunal. The ontology is only as sound as the scope of the records it is applied to. That principle is what this report exists, in its corrected form, to demonstrate.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was signed in 1977 to establish the United States as the first country in the world to criminalize the bribery of foreign officials abroad. For nearly five decades the statute has anchored an American export: the extraterritorial anti-corruption norm that spread through the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, the UN Convention Against Corruption, and the enforcement regimes of dozens of signatory states. The statute remains in force. Its American enforcement remains in force. What has changed is where that enforcement happens. Over fifteen years, and under the specific statutory authority Congress granted in 2010, the SEC progressively consolidated corporate FCPA enforcement into its administrative tribunals: a forum with narrower discovery, no jury, less transparency, less independent adjudication, and a materially higher SEC win rate. The Supreme Court has begun to constrain this forum at one edge. The current administration paused the parallel DOJ channel and then resumed it under narrower guidelines. Individual FCPA prosecutions by the SEC have compressed to three actions in the five years from 2020 through 2024\. The corporate settlement pipeline continues. The record shows all of this, but only when the full record is read and only when the exact numbers are drawn from the specialist sources that track FCPA enforcement carefully. That is the finding this report exists to document, and the accountability question it exists to raise.

Trace Origin LLC

Structural intelligence for investigations. Continuing series: formal analysis of enforcement records that hide their patterns until read together.

#### Source

[SEC EDGAR Litigation Releases](https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)  
[SEC EDGAR Administrative Proceedings](https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/administrative-proceedings?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)  
[Stanford FCPA Clearinghouse](https://fcpa.stanford.edu/?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)  
[FCPA Professor (Mike Koehler)](https://fcpaprofessor.com/?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)  
[Global Investigations Review](https://globalinvestigationsreview.com/?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)  
[Miller & Chevalier](https://www.millerchevalier.com/?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)

#### Contact

[ebrattin@traceoriginresearch.com](mailto:ebrattin@traceoriginresearch.com)  
[LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericbrattin?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)  
[GitHub (SECEO)](https://github.com/TruthQuest/sec-eo-graph/?ref=traceoriginresearch.com)

© 2026 Trace Origin LLC · All rights reserved · Ontology and analytical outputs licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Non-commercial academic citation and journalistic quotation permitted with attribution · Named individuals and entities identified in the analysis are named in publicly available SEC filings; inclusion here reflects the record of enforcement filings and should not be construed as an accusation, finding of liability, or statement of legal conclusion beyond what those filings themselves state