On June 9, at the request of the Futures Industry Association, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) Division of Swap Dealer and Intermediary Oversight (DSIO) and Division of Market Oversight (DMO) announced that they have extended no-action relief that was set to expire on June 30.  DSIO and DMO originally issued a series of CFTC Staff Letters on March 17 (Nos. 20-02, 20-03, 20-04, 20-05, 20-06, 20-07, and 20-09, collectively, COVID-19 Letters) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which provided no-action relief to market participants for failure to comply with certain CFTC regulations, where compliance was expected to be impracticable because of the broad-sweeping measures taken to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Specifically, the COVID-19 Letters provided relief with respect to certain recordkeeping and reporting obligations of the following market participants: (1) futures commission merchants, (2) introducing brokers, (3) swap dealers, (4) retail foreign exchange dealers, (5) floor brokers, and (6) persons that are members of designated contract markets or swap execution facilities that are not registered with the CFTC in any capacity.

The no-action relief provided by the COVID-19 Letters were set to expire on June 30. The staff has now extended this relief until September 30, subject to the terms and conditions as stated in the applicable COVID-19 Letters.

For more information, the CFTC Letter No. 20-19 is available here.