Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission released its Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2014 through 2018, as required by the Government Performance and Results Act Modernization Act of 2010. In the Strategic Plan, the SEC identified four main strategic goals:

• Establishing and maintaining an effective regulatory environment;

• Fostering and enforcing compliance with the federal securities laws;

• Facilitating access to the information investors need to make informed investment decisions; and

• Enhancing the SEC’s performance through effective alignment of human, information and financial capital.

The SEC also identified various strategic objectives related to these goals, as well as several initiatives that it intends to undertake to achieve its strategic goals and objectives, including: 

• Improving the quality and usefulness of registrants’ disclosure;

• Modernizing beneficial ownership reporting to address, among other things, disclosure obligations relating to the use of equity swaps and other derivatives;

• Enhancing the technological resilience of securities markets to ensure the development of adequate procedures with regard to automated systems and to guard against technological failures;

• Enhancing oversight of derivatives, including rulemaking for mutual fund use of derivatives;

• Improving oversight of small capitalization issuers to assure appropriate investor protections and promote market efficiency;

• Improving its management of tips, complaints and referrals to spot trends and patterns about potential issues or violations; and

• Designing and implementing enhancements to EDGAR and SEC.gov to facilitate access to, and utilization of, disclosure documents and other information.

A copy of the Strategic Plan is available here.