Arthur Levitt - Chairman of The SEC

Chairman of The SEC

Levitt was appointed to his first five-year term as Chairman of the SEC by President Clinton in July 1993 and reappointed in May 1998. He left the Commission on February 9, 2001, and was succeeded by Harvey Pitt. Levitt has said that he first learned of his being considered for the job from The Wall Street Journal.

At the time Levitt came to the SEC, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) had proposed requiring companies to record stock options on their income statements, which split the accounting industry and was opposed by many in the American business community. According to a Merrill Lynch study, expensing stock options would have reduced profits among leading high-tech companies by 60% on average. Congress began to exert pressure on the FASB, and on May 3, 1994, the Senate, led by Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman, offered a non-binding resolution urging FASB not to adopt the proposed rule; the vote in favor was 88-9. Concerned that insensitivity to this sentiment in Congress might threaten FASB as an independent standard setter, Levitt urged the FASB to not go ahead with the rule proposal. He later said this "was probably the single biggest mistake I made in my years at the SEC."

In September 1998 at New York University, he gave a speech entitled "The Numbers Game". It addressed five ways in which corporations were managing earnings (big bath charges, creative acquisition accounting, cookie-jar reserves, materiality, revenue recognition). In his speech, Levitt advocated improving the transparency and comparability of financial statements.

In 1997, the SEC under Levitt's leadership approved the exemption of some Enron partnerships from the tight accounting controls of the Investment Company Act of 1940. Without this exemption, critics maintain, the company would have been constrained by strict rules found in 1996 legislation that would have prohibited certain foreign investments and the shifting of debt to its foreign subsidiary shell companies.

During Levitt's tenure at the SEC, he was widely viewed as a pro-investor advocate and received favorable press coverage. More recently he has come under criticism for failing to act against 1990s bull market abuses and not uncovering Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme.