The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that a Texas bank (the "Bank") and other plaintiffs have the legal standing to proceed with a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ("CFPB"), as well as the recess appointment of Director Richard Cordray. However, the Court also ruled that the Bank lacked the standing to challenge the constitutionality of the Financial Stability Oversight Council ("FSOC") and Dodd-Frank's grant of authority to the federal government to liquidate failing financial companies that are said to pose risks to U.S

In an effort to help managers combat fraud, the United States Government Accountability Office ("GAO") identified leading practices for managing fraud risks and put forth the Fraud Risk Management Framework (the "Framework"). The Framework encompasses control activities to prevent, detect and respond to fraud. GAO believes that the Framework will facilitate proactive fraud risk management. S ee: GAO Fraud Framework Report.

FINRA fined a firm for systemic Order Audit Trail System ("OATS") reporting violations that spanned a period of several years. In addition, the firm was fined for failure to submit accurate trade reports to the appropriate FINRA Trade Reporting Facility and related supervisory failures. Although the firm's trading systems captured order event times in milliseconds, FINRA stated, the firm still failed to report order event timestamps in milliseconds for a 10-month period. FINRA reported that the firm submitted a large number of inaccurate, incomplete or improperly formatted trade reports that

Comptroller of the Office of the Currency ("OCC") Thomas J. Curry discussed the importance of the New England Council, remarking that it provides a place for businesses of different sizes and types to work together in the interests of a prosperous regional and national economy. His speech highlighted challenges businesses face, including: (i) the "near certainty" of rising interest rates and how they could imperil loan quality; (ii) the impact of new and tougher regulatory compliance, such as Dodd-Frank; (iii) resulting growing costs of regulation, and (iv) constant cyber threats. Lofchie

SIFMA released a public statement in support of the framework announced by NYSE and Nasdaq to enhance the resiliency of the closing auction process for U.S. equities, and commended NYSE and Nasdaq for collaborating with each other in developing "a framework designed to benefit the entire market." The plan would be implemented in situations where one of the exchanges is having an outage for technological or other reasons, as was the case in the recent NYSE outage. Moving forward, SIFMA urged the exchanges to work directly with SIFMA in developing the details of the proposal. S ee: SIFMA