The SEC’s headline number for FY2025 is $17.9 billion. The real number is $2.7 billion.
After stripping out $8 billion tied to the Stanford Ponzi scheme (a decade-old litigation) and excluding amounts covered by parallel criminal proceedings, total disgorgement and penalties came to $1.4 billion and $1.3 billion respectively. That’s $2.7 billion in fresh enforcement dollars across 456 cases filed.
The SEC under Gensler brought 95 actions totaling $2.3 billion in penalties just for off-channel communications violations, the WhatsApp fines that hammered Wall Street banks. Chairman Atkins called those cases a “misallocation of Commission resources.” Seven crypto enforcement actions were dismissed outright, including cases against Coinbase and Binance.
Two-thirds of standalone actions named individual defendants — a 27% year-over-year jump — and nearly nine out of ten standalone actions filed under Acting Chairman Uyeda and Chairman Atkins involved individual charges.
The current Commission didn’t just shift priorities. It rewrote the scoreboard mid-game, breaking out “deemed satisfied” amounts that prior Commissions had historically buried in headline totals. That’s not accounting transparency — that’s a political argument dressed as methodology.
FY2026 results, for the year ending September 30, 2026, will be the first clean read on what this enforcement era actually produces.
Marcus Webb