SEC Follow-On Administrative Proceedings, Fiscal Year 2020

Administrative proceedings seeking bars, suspensions, or other collateral relief based on a prior criminal conviction, civil judgment, or another regulator’s action.

Follow-on administrative proceedings are the SEC's fastest and most mechanical enforcement lever, and that mechanical quality is exactly what makes them useful for exposure and duration modeling in a way standalone actions are not. A follow-on proceeding seeks a bar, suspension, or other collateral consequence based on a fact pattern someone else already established — a criminal conviction, a civil judgment, another regulator's finding — so the SEC is not building a case from scratch. That structural difference compresses the timeline sharply: where a standalone matter can run for years from first inquiry to resolution, a follow-on proceeding is frequently resolved within months of the predicate action becoming final, because the contested factual question has already been decided elsewhere.

For an individual or firm that has just resolved a criminal or civil matter involving securities-related conduct, the practical reading of the follow-on-proceedings trend is that the SEC's collateral-consequence exposure is close to automatic once a predicate is in place, not a discretionary follow-up that might or might not happen. Counsel structuring a settlement in a parallel proceeding — criminal, civil, or before another regulator — should treat the follow-on bar or suspension question as a near-certainty to be negotiated up front, including its scope and duration, rather than a separate risk to be addressed only if and when the SEC acts.

The resolution-path distribution for follow-on matters is also narrower than for standalone actions: because liability is not being relitigated, the live questions are almost entirely about the scope and length of the bar or suspension, not whether one will issue. That narrowness is itself decision-useful information — it means the variance an insurer or funder needs to price around a follow-on exposure is concentrated in remedy severity, not in outcome uncertainty, which is a meaningfully different risk shape than the wide standalone-action distribution.

Volume trends in follow-on proceedings also track the SEC's parallel-proceeding coordination with DOJ and state regulators more than they track the Division's own independent priorities, which means reading a follow-on count in isolation from criminal and civil disposition trends in the same period understates what is driving it. Criterica Intelligence's regulated outcomes framing treats follow-on exposure as a derivative, near-mechanical extension of a predicate matter's outcome — see how that framing changes remedy-scope planning for the parties managing a pending predicate action.

Figures on this page are drawn from official agency publications, cited individually below, and reflect the agency’s own reporting as of the date shown for each figure. They are not Criterica Intelligence model outputs, are not predictions, and are not a measure of any party’s legal exposure or liability. Agencies periodically revise prior-year figures; where a revision is known, both figures are shown with their sources. This page does not constitute legal, investment, or compliance advice.