Tenure At SEC
As acting General Counsel, Vollmer was quickly thrust into the spotlight as he testified on February 4, 2009 before the United States House Committee on Financial Services subcommittee with SEC Director of the Division of Enforcement Linda Thomsen and other senior staff from the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). The subject of the hearings were on why the SEC had failed to act when Harry Markopolos, a private fraud investigator from Boston alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission detailing his persistent and unsuccessful efforts to get the SEC to investigate Bernard L. Madoff, beginning in 1999. Vollmer claimed executive privilege in declining to answer some questions, and Vollmer and the other SEC officials' lack of cooperation with the enquiry was strongly criticised by Subcommittee chairman Paul Kanjorski and Representative Gary Ackerman saying "Your value to the American people is worthless. ... Our economy is in crisis, Mr. Vollmer. We thought the enemy was Mr. Madoff. I think it's you."
On 18 February 2009, 14 days later, the SEC announced that Vollmer would 'leave the Commission and return to the private sector'. It was later announced that he would take up a post with his former firm, WilmerHale.
Read more about this topic: Andy Vollmer
Famous quotes containing the word tenure:
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)