The IRS and the Treasury are not considering providing a grace period for penalties for failure to comply with FATCA, which begins on July 1, according to a Treasury official speaking at a recent conference. Quyen Huynh, an attorney-advisor in the Treasury's Office of International Tax Counsel, also repeated prior statements by the Treasury and IRS officials that the July 1 effective date of FATCA will not be delayed further despite the fact that the IRS has still not finalized several tax forms related to FATCA. At that same conference, the Treasury's International Tax Counsel Danielle Rolfes

A report from two academic professors, released by the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, found that SEC employees' hedge portfolios earn positive and economically significant abnormal returns. Shivaram Rajgopal of Emory University and Roger M. White of Georgia State University (the "researchers") used data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to investigate the trading strategies of the SEC's 3,500 employees during 2009-2011. The researchers found that the abnormal returns came from the selling, not buying, of stocks ahead of a decline in stock prices. They

The CFTC Division of Swap Dealer and Intermediary Oversight ("DSIO") issued a letter providing time-limited no-action relief to commodity pool operators ("CPOs") that requested exemptions regarding annual reports. CFTC Letter 14-24 provides no-action relief to the CPO of a commodity pool from CFTC Rule 4.7(b)(3) ("Relief Available to CPOs") and Rule 4.22(d) ("Reporting to Pool Participants"), both of which require that the CPO distribute to its participants, and file with the National Futures Association ("NFA"), an Annual Report within 90 days of the close of the Pool's fiscal year. The

The CFTC and FERC announced the initial transmission of market data under the recently adopted CFTC-FERC Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU") for use in analyzing market activities and protecting market integrity. The agencies also announced the creation of a staff-level Interagency Surveillance and Data Analytics Working Group to coordinate information-sharing between the agencies and focus on data security, data sharing infrastructure and the use of analytical tools for regulatory purposes. As directed by Dodd-Frank, the CFTC and FERC entered into an MOU on January 2, 2014. According to the

CFTC Commissioner Scott O'Malia issued a statement of dissent which criticized both the CFTC's FY 2015 budget request and the agency itself for making "improbable funding requests" and underfunding technology. According to O'Malia, the CFTC failed to develop a strategic plan which included a technology and workforce investment program, thereby missing the statutory deadline for submitting the plan to the Obama Administration and Congress. O'Malia stated that the CFTC made "an unrealistic request for new staff and funding in this budget request without a firm understanding of its mission