Welcome and thank you for joining today's webinar hosted by me Joe Boyhan of MCO and Brian Rubin and Adam Pollet of Eversheds Sutherland. With that I'll hand you over to my co-hosts.

So let's get on to the stats from the SEC for fiscal year 2016. This is data from the SEC's annual enforcement report and the select SEC and market data annual publication. You can see there was a record number of enforcement actions in fiscal year 2016; 868. That is up from 807 in fiscal year 2015. In the first half of this fiscal year, the number of enforcement actions was virtually unchanged from 2016 when you exclude actions against delinquent filers.

The SEC has continued to file the vast majority of its actions about 80%, as administrative proceedings rather than civil actions. You can see here there was also a record number in 2016 of enforcement actions against investment advisors and investment companies as well as broker dealers. The actions against broker dealers are up by 20%. In this fiscal year there have been approximately 75 cases so far. Now keep in mind the second half of the year is typically where we see a significant increase so those numbers will go up.

Now we get to the penalties. There were over $4 billion in disgorgement and penalties assessed by the SEC during fiscal year 2016. This was the third highest amount since the financial crisis and although the total isn't a record, it is still extremely high.