HR9329-119

What This Bill Does

H.R. 9329 changes how the Securities and Exchange Commission writes rules, supervises auditors, counts violations, and organizes its staff. It requires a documented costs-and-benefits justification for covered regulations, cumulative analysis of related rules, and retrospective assessment of major rules. Two years after enactment, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board terminates and an Office of Public Accounting Oversight within the SEC Chief Accountant's office takes over audit supervision. The reported text places transferred legal powers with the Commission and preserves existing PCAOB rules as Commission rules at termination. This is a change of regulator, not abolition of audit registration, standards, or inspections.

Who Benefits and How

Public-company managers, accounting firms, investment advisers, and broker-dealer staff gain additional opportunities to contest the costs and alternatives of proposed rules. Market participants have at least 60 days to comment on covered proposals, or 30 for imminent investor harm, excluding federal holidays. Securities-law defendants benefit because separate acts with a common or substantially overlapping cause, the same misstatement or omission, or a continuing failure to comply must count as one violation for the specified penalties. Accounting-support-fee payers could benefit from discretionary rather than mandatory fee funding for the new oversight office, but the bill does not guarantee a fee reduction. Investor advocates and pension funds gain economic-assessment reports, congressional testimony, and scrutiny of SEC cybersecurity.

Who Bears the Burden and How

The SEC, its Chief Economist, and Government Accountability Office staff must perform additional analysis, data collection, audits, testimony, and reports. PCAOB employees face institutional termination and a transition to the SEC-led system; the text does not itself guarantee individual jobs. Investor protection may improve through more accountable rules and cybersecurity review, while delayed rulemaking and lower aggregate penalty exposure could reduce timely protection or deterrence. Those investor effects are inferences, not quantified outcomes. The accounting standard-setting body remains fee funded and becomes subject to explicit SEC budget approval. The new office remains responsible for inspections, and the Commission must establish fair investigation and discipline procedures. No overall appropriation, staffing guarantee, or quantified savings is supplied.

Key Provisions

• Requires qualitative and quantitative regulatory analysis, comparison with not regulating and other alternatives, cumulative effects, and a reasoned finding that benefits justify costs; specified formal, internal, statutorily excluded, and certified emergency actions are excepted.
• Requires major-rule assessment reports within four years unless a justified extension is published at least 90 days before the deadline, followed by publication for comment within 30 days of receipt.
• Requires the SEC chair to testify at least every six months, with commissioners joining annually; directs a one-year GAO IT audit and recurring major-rule studies every three years after the initial one-year deadline.
• Terminates the PCAOB after two years, preserves its rules and foreign cooperative arrangements or agreements, and assigns audit oversight to the SEC Chief Accountant's office with continuing inspections.
• Makes funding of the oversight office through accounting support fees discretionary, while retaining fee funding and SEC approval for the accounting standard-setting body's budget.
• Limits counting of related or continuing noncompliance as separate violations under the listed securities-law penalty provisions; it does not repeal the underlying prohibitions.
• Requires an organizational review within 180 days, practicable reassignment of direct reports within another 90 days, a report within 30 days thereafter, and permits regional-office consolidation when the SEC finds it appropriate.