27. Financial Regulatory Agencies · Notable
Send all SRO fines to a new investor reimbursement fund or the Treasury
Printed page 836 27. Financial Regulatory Agencies
“Require that all SRO fines, including those imposed by FINRA, should go either to a newly established investor reimbursement fund or to the Treasury. SROs should not have a financial interest in imposing fines.”
What has happened
- Not started
No investor reimbursement fund exists or has been proposed, and no SRO has been required to hand its fine income to the Treasury. A Federal Register full-text search for "investor reimbursement fund" since 2025-01-20 returns zero documents; the complete set of 85 FINRA rule filings for the window contains no change to the disposition of fine monies; the SEC's Regulatory Flexibility Agenda of 2026-08-14 carries no entry on SRO fines or SRO governance; and no 119th-Congress bill in the corpus addresses it.
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
FINRA continues to retain the fines it imposes, and the Commission approved no rule change about their disposition in the window.
- The negative rests on the complete Federal Register record of SEC action on self-regulatory organizations for 2025-01-20 to 2026-09-01, not on a keyword search alone: every FINRA rule change is published as an SEC filing notice, and all 85 were listed and read.
- The Commission’s own statement of what it intends to propose, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/14/2026-16619/regulatory-flexibility-agenda (2026-08-14), has 21 printed entries and none of them concerns SROs. Following the reading adopted for #2130, #2141 and #2131 on pages 830–831, an agenda entry would in any case be an intention rather than a rung; here there is not even an intention.
- Cluster negative search for pages 836–837 is recorded in
docs/research/ch-27.md.
- Action
- transfer
- Object
- fines imposed by SROs, including FINRA
- ID
- 2170