Client Alert: The SEC’s 2026 Draft Strategic Plan Signals Continuing “New Day” for Enforcement
June 8, 2026
I. Introduction
As promised by Chairman Paul Atkins when he announced “A New Day” at the SEC over 400 days ago, the Enforcement Division looks far different than it did at the beginning of 2025. Chairman Atkins, Acting Chairman Mark Uyeda before him, and now Enforcement Division Director David Woodcock have all consistently communicated the same themes: bread-and-butter enforcement cases, investor protection, individual accountability, clarity and certainty, and quality over quantity. The recently announced draft Strategic Plan demonstrates that this New Day will persist into 2030.
For investment funds and investment advisers (“Funds and Advisers”), these shifts carry particular significance. The Enforcement Division has made clear that breaches of fiduciary duty, conflicts of interest, valuation issues, and fee-related misconduct remain core priorities. At the same time, the new regime offers meaningful opportunities. Understanding how the SEC’s evolving enforcement posture applies to your business is essential to staying ahead of regulatory risk. This alert analyzes the Enforcement Division’s recent trends and offers practical guidance for Funds and Advisers moving forward into this “New Day.”
II. Draft Strategic Plan
On June 2, 2026, the SEC released a draft Strategic Plan, offering insight into what is to come for the agency and the industries it regulates through 2030. As to Enforcement in particular, the draft Strategic Plan signals a focus on violations of “established law, with a particular focus on fraud and manipulation.” This language suggests a continued retreat from the prior administration’s approach of using enforcement actions to establish new regulatory norms. Traditional Enforcement cases, like misappropriation, fraud, and manipulation, will remain high on the Division’s list of priorities.
Success, for the next four years, will be evaluated not by the number of cases or the amount of fines collected, but by two new measures: the deterrent effect of the action or settlement, and the “clarity” the action provides to the marketplace. We should not expect to see the number of Enforcement cases rise. The cases that are brought will likely be well curated to focus the market on the messages leadership wants to send. Again, this indicates an emphasis on investor protection focused cases, like fraud, theft, and abuse.
The plan also explicitly prioritizes helping market participants comply rather than punishing them after the fact. Goal 2 commits to “facilitate compliance efforts of market participants.” Taken together with prior remarks by leadership, this goal may signal a shift toward incentivizing self-policing by regulated entities, and away from devoting Enforcement resources to policy and procedure failures without attendant investor losses.
III. The Plan Aligns with the New Day Enforcement Approach
The draft Strategic Plan builds on several previous communications the Chairman and the Division have issued since Chairman Atkins took the reins of the agency in April 2025.
Enforcement Manual Updates. In February, the Division updated the Enforcement Manual for the first time in nearly a decade. Key changes included (a) a standardized and reasonable submission timeline for Wells notice recipients to provide a responsive submission, (b) increased access to Division leadership, (c) a return to simultaneous consideration of waiver requests with settlement offers, and (d) commitment to annual reviews of the Manual going forward.
Announcement of FY25 Enforcement Results. Chairman Atkins, in announcing the FY25 results in April, said the Commission has “put a stop to regulation by enforcement and recentered its enforcement program on the Commission’s core mission by prioritizing cases that provide meaningful investor protection and strengthen market integrity.” The Commission, he added, has redirected resources toward the types of misconduct “that inflict the greatest harm, particularly fraud, market manipulation, and abuses of trust, and away from approaches that prioritized volume and record-setting penalties over true investor protection.” The release also made stark contrasts against the actions of the prior Commission. The Commission noted that since FY22 the prior leadership brought 95 actions and $2.3 billion in penalties for off-channel recordkeeping violations alone, together with seven crypto registration cases and six “definition of a dealer” cases, each of which, the current Commission says, identified no direct investor harm and reflected a “misallocation of Commission resources” and “a bias for volume of cases brought versus matters of investor protection.”
The numbers reveal a strong emphasis on individual accountability. Approximately two-thirds of FY25 standalone actions involved charges against individuals, a 27% year-over-year increase, and nearly nine out of ten standalone actions filed under Acting Chairman Uyeda and Chairman Atkins included individual charges. The Commission also obtained orders barring 119 individuals from serving as officers and directors of public companies.
The volume of cases was indisputably, and not surprisingly, trending down. 456 total actions is the lowest annual total in more than two decades, and that decline is even starker than the number suggests: a meaningful share of those 456 actions were filed in the first quarter of FY25, before Chairman Atkins took office. Stripping out that early-period activity, the actual pace of enforcement under the current Commission is dramatically lower than the headline number suggests.
The monetary figures cut the other way at first glance, but are similarly misleading. The $17.9 billion total relief looks historically large, but after excluding amounts deemed satisfied by parallel non-SEC orders and the long-running Stanford Ponzi-scheme judgments, the adjusted figures come in at a comparatively paltry $1.4 billion in disgorgement and prejudgment interest and $1.3 billion in civil penalties. Both figures, properly understood, are consistent with a Division that is bringing fewer cases and prioritizing deterrence over headline numbers.
Director Woodcock’s Inaugural Remarks. Director Woodcock’s recent remarks struck a similar tone. Speaking at the MFA’s Legal & Compliance Conference on May 13, in his first remarks as Enforcement Director, Woodcock endorsed the “quality over quantity” line and committed to taking the Division “back to basics.” His list of priorities included expected aspects: offering frauds, accounting and disclosure fraud, insider trading, market manipulation, fraud by foreign actors targeting U.S. markets, and breaches of fiduciary duty by advisers using client assets. Importantly, Woodcock gave specific attention to investment advisers and private fund advisers, and warned that the Division remains attuned to risks relating to liquidity, fees, valuations, and conflicts of interest “not only at the private fund adviser level but throughout the distribution chain.” In closing he noted that “the Commission recognizes the difference between error and fraud, and our remedies will be calibrated accordingly. A company that self-reports, cooperates fully, and remediates will not be treated the same as one that conceals or obstructs.” Funds and Advisers should not, however, mistake this “quality over quantity” approach for reduced scrutiny. Woodcock’s list of priorities reads like a catalogue of what gets brought against advisers and private funds in any given year.
Rescission of No-Admit No-Deny Policy. On May 18, the Commission rescinded its 54-year-old “no-admit no-deny” policy, which had required defendants in settled enforcement actions to agree never to publicly deny the Commission’s allegations. The rescission aligns with the broader “New Day” themes of transparency and streamlined resolution. For Funds and Advisers, it removes a friction point from the settlement process: firms can now resolve matters without accepting a perpetual prohibition on their ability to communicate with investors, counterparties, and regulators about the underlying facts. Taken together, these developments—the Strategic Plan’s compliance-first framing, the Manual’s procedural reforms, the FY25 results’ focus on fraud over volume, Director Woodcock’s “back to basics” priorities, and the rescission—paint a consistent picture of an Enforcement Division that rewards early engagement, cooperation, and remediation.
IV. Practical Takeaways for Funds and Advisers
- Devote more time and resources to Wells submissions and early advocacy. Funds and Advisers tend to have complicated structures and nuanced regulatory obligations. Enforcement staff, particularly after the recent reductions in Division personnel, do not always have the time or specialized expertise to work through those complications on their own. A well-crafted Wells submission can do that work for them. In some cases, it makes the difference between a contested action and a decision not to recommend charges at all. The revised Enforcement Manual gives recipients four weeks to respond and requires the Division to set a Wells meeting (with senior leadership present) within four weeks of the submission, so counsel now have both the time and the audience to make substantive submissions worthwhile. For similar reasons, Funds and Advisers should consider submitting pre-Wells white papers earlier in the investigative process.
- Refresh policies on self-reporting, cooperation, and remediation. The draft Strategic Plan’s commitment to “facilitate compliance,” together with Director Woodcock’s “error versus fraud” framing make self-reporting, cooperation, and timely remediation more valuable than ever. Funds and Advisers should refresh their internal escalation and disclosure protocols so that potential violations reach senior compliance and legal personnel quickly, with a clear framework for whether and when to self-report. Remediation should be documented contemporaneously, tied to identified control gaps, and (where it helps) validated by independent compliance review. Firms that can present a credible record of prompt detection, candid disclosure, and real remediation will be well positioned to obtain reduced penalties, favorable settlement terms, or even avoid interaction with Enforcement altogether.
- Modify waiver strategy. The Manual’s restored practice of permitting simultaneous Commission consideration of a settlement offer and any related waiver request matters more to Funds and Advisers than to almost any other type of respondent. Collateral consequences of an enforcement settlement, especially “bad actor” disqualifications under Regulation D and disqualifications under Section 9(a) of the Investment Company Act (and the related WKSI, Regulation A, and Crowdfunding disqualifications), can shut down significant parts of an investment management business. Firms facing potential action should figure out early which disqualifications a proposed settlement would trigger, assess what each would mean for the business, and put together a coordinated settlement-and-waiver package supported by evidence of remediation, compliance enhancements, and (where it helps) independent oversight. If the Commission denies the waiver, the settling party has five business days to confirm whether it still wishes to proceed, which effectively permits parties to condition their settlement offers on obtaining waiver relief.
- Monitor updates. The Commission has committed to reviewing the Enforcement Manual annually, so Funds and Advisers should either fold Manual monitoring into their ongoing regulatory tracking or have outside counsel do it for them.
- Do not let your guard down. Funds and Advisers should resist the temptation to read into the low Enforcement figures a total diminution of risk or oversight. The Division has repeatedly emphasized a continued vigilance toward core Enforcement priorities like fraud, manipulation, breaches of fiduciary duty, and other violations that threaten investor harm. In fact, with fewer resources devoted to novel or complicated cases, we may see more investigative resources devoted to these core violations. Funds and Advisers should ensure compliance procedures are robust and trusted counsel are in place for any Enforcement or Exams inquiries that may come.
V. Conclusion
More than 400 days into this “New Day” at the SEC, the landscape for Funds and Advisers has fundamentally shifted. The Draft Strategic Plan’s emphasis on deterrence, clarity, and facilitating compliance – combined with the Enforcement Manual overhaul, the FY25 results, Director Woodcock’s remarks, and the rescission of the no-admit no-deny policy – signals a sustained move toward a more predictable, streamlined, investor harm-focused regime. Funds and Advisers that invest in updates to match the current Enforcement environment will be well positioned to navigate this environment.
If you have questions about how these developments affect your fund or advisory business, or if you would like assistance reviewing your enforcement readiness, please contact the Croke Fairchild team. The Private Funds & Investment Management and Litigation & Investigations teams are available to help you assess your policies, prepare for potential SEC engagement, and develop strategies tailored to this new Enforcement environment.
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