You can still get a lot from the SEC

Zach Goldfarb of The Washington Post writes that the Fox Business Network‘s story about new rules at the Securities and Exchange Commission limiting what public information it will release is a little overblown.

Goldfarb writes, “While, as Fox notes, the law exempts the SEC from disclosing records derived from ‘surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities,’ this only concerns documents obtained through examinations of broker-dealers and investment advisers — periodic or targeted reviews of financial firms.

“People and organizations can still use FOIA to obtain a range of SEC information, such as inspector general reports; communications with Congress and the business community; and officials’ calendar, salary and conflict-of-interest information.

“Information from investigations into potential wrongdoing has never been obtainable through FOIA.

“John Nester, SEC spokesman, said:

‘We are expanding our examination program’s surveillance and risk assessment efforts in order to provide more sophisticated and effective Wall Street oversight. The success of these efforts depends on our ability to obtain documents and other information from brokers, investment advisers and other registrants. The new legislation makes certain that we can obtain documents from registrants for risk assessment and surveillance under similar conditions that already exist by law for our examinations. Because registrants insist on confidential treatment of their documents, this new provision also removes an opportunity for brokers, investment advisers and other registrants to refuse to cooperate with our examination document requests.'”

Read more here.