Exempt non-custodial broker-dealers from PCAOB-registered audit requirements

Research notes

• Why partial and not attempted. The 17h order is not a proposal; it took effect on issue and it removes a recurring filing obligation from a defined class of small, non-carrying broker-dealers. That is a piece of the ask delivered, in the sense of playbook §3. The audit requirement, which is the half the Quote spells out, is statutory in part and would need either a Commission rule amending Rule 17a-5 or an amendment to Exchange Act section 17(e).
• Vocabulary. The Mandate says “non-custodial”; the Commission’s rules say “non-carrying” - a broker-dealer that does not hold funds or securities for customers, does not owe money or securities to customers and does not carry customer accounts, or that is exempt under Rule 15c3-3(k)(2). They describe the same firms, which is why the order is on point.
• Other in-window relief for small broker-dealers, noted but not cited: the compliance-date extensions for the electronic FOCUS Report amendments (2025-09-10) and for the daily reserve computation under the Customer Protection Rule (2025-07-01), and the technical amendments to Form X-17A-5 Part IIA (2026-06-25). These are timing and forms changes rather than removals of an obligation.
• PCAOB context. The Board itself continues to operate and the SEC approved its 2026 budget and accounting support fee on 2026-01-26 - see #2125, which tracks the ask to abolish it. Nothing in that record narrows which firms must use a PCAOB-registered auditor.
• sec.gov is not a hard 403 (read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06). It refuses a bare curl and a browser User-Agent and answers 200 with full content to the full Chrome header set, the third rung of scripts/fetch-page.mjs. What the row asked for nonetheless does not exist: the Commission publishes no small-entity compliance guide index at any of the three plausible paths (/rules-regulations/small-entity-compliance-guides, /resources-small-businesses/small-entity-compliance-guides, /about/small-entity-compliance-guides — all 404), and the reason is structural. A small-entity compliance guide is produced under the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act for a rule; the 17h relief here is an exemptive order under Exchange Act section 17(h)(4), which carries no such guide, and Rule 17a-5’s PCAOB-registered-auditor requirement was not amended, so nothing triggered one. The live indexes are /rules-regulations/rulemaking-activity, /rules-regulations/policy-statements and /rules-regulations/no-action-interpretive-exemptive-letters; none carries a 17a-5 or 17h guide.
• The Commission’s 350 speeches and statements from 2025 and 2026 were enumerated from sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements; none concerns Rule 17a-5, Rule 17h or the PCAOB-registered-auditor requirement for broker-dealers.