Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Minor

Open FINRA arbitration and disciplinary hearings to the public

Not started

836 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies

“FINRA arbitration and disciplinary hearings should be open to the public and reported.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing opens FINRA's arbitration or disciplinary hearings to the public. Every FINRA rule change reaches the Federal Register as an SEC filing notice, and the complete set for this window — 85 documents, read in full — contains only three arbitration items (arbitrator list selection, an accelerated-processing rule for elderly or ill parties, and a 2026 re-opening of list selection) and two hearing-process items (a mandatory Office of Hearing Officers portal, and video-conference hearings, which other exchanges then harmonized to). None of them touches public access or reporting. The SEC's own Regulatory Flexibility Agenda of 2026-08-14 lists no self-regulatory-organization governance entry, and no 119th-Congress bill would require it: a full-text search of the Federal Register for "hearings shall be open to the public" and of govinfo's bill collection for "Financial Industry Regulatory Authority" returns nothing on point. **The baseline was read on 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07) and the Quote's two words come apart.** "Reported" is already substantially true on the arbitration side and has been since 2007: FINRA Rule 12904(h) provides that "[a]ll awards shall be made publicly available". "Open to the public" is not true of either kind of hearing, and nothing read supports it — Rule 9261, which governs evidence and procedure at a disciplinary hearing, confers a right to be heard on the parties and says nothing about anyone else attending. This does **not** make the item `pre_satisfied`: that flag requires that nothing in the ask remain outstanding, and what remains is the whole of the access limb plus reporting of the hearings themselves rather than of the awards.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The Quote has two objects — arbitration hearings and disciplinary hearings — and neither moved.

  • The complete Federal Register record of FINRA rule filings for 2025-01-20 to 2026-09-01 was listed and read (jq 'select(.title|test("Financial Industry Regulatory";"i"))' across fr-*.ndjson, 85 records). The arbitration filings are https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/25/2025-16185/self-regulatory-organizations-financial-industry-regulatory-authority-inc-order-approving-a-proposed (arbitrator list selection, approved 2025-08-25) and https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/26/2025-16293/self-regulatory-organizations-financial-industry-regulatory-authority-inc-order-approving-a-proposed (accelerated processing for parties qualifying by age or health, approved 2025-08-26). Both are procedural and neither opens a hearing.
  • On the disciplinary side, FINRA required use of an Office of Hearing Officers portal (2025-08-15, 2025-15521) and allowed video-conference hearings, which the Investors Exchange harmonized to in https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/03/09/2026-04502/self-regulatory-organizations-investors-exchange-llc-notice-of-filing-and-immediate-effectiveness-of (2026-03-09). Format, not access.
  • FINRA’s own rulebook and its Code of Arbitration Procedure live on finra.org, which is a private self-regulatory organization and is not on the evidence allowlist. The pre-2025 baseline for how open each kind of hearing already is therefore cannot be evidenced here; what can be evidenced is that nothing in the window changed it.
  • Cluster negative search for pages 836–837 is recorded in docs/research/ch-27.md.
  • FINRA’s rulebook was read on 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07), as a lead. finra.org is a private self-regulatory organization and is off the evidence allowlist by design, not by a wall: finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/<number> opens to a bare curl. It also rate-limits hard — four rules read, then HTTP 403 on every request for the next half hour, through three spaced retries. Rules 9261 (Evidence and Procedure in Hearing) and 12904 (Awards) were read in full before that; Rule 9145, which governs attendance at disciplinary hearings, and the FINRA By-Laws provisions on rulemaking were not. Nothing read here is Evidence and none of it changes a Status; it establishes how much of each ask was already true on 2025-01-20, which is what the read-queue row asked for.
  • The attendance rule itself (Rule 9145) could not be read before the rate limit closed the host, so the “open to the public” finding here rests on the absence of any public-access provision in Rule 9261 and on the absence of any change in the window, not on a quoted prohibition. Recorded so the next pass reads Rule 9145 first.
Action
other
Object
FINRA arbitration and disciplinary hearings
ID
2168