The SEC was established by the United States Congress in 1934. The SEC consists of 4 divisions, including the (1) Division of Corporate Finance, (2) Division of Market Regulation, (3) Division of Investment Management, and (4) Division of Enforcement. The primary responsibility of the SEC is to regulate the stock market and prevent corporate abuses re the offering and sale of securities and corporate securities.

• In 2002, the SEC supervised over 8,000 registered broker-dealers with approximately 92,200 branch offices and 675,500 registered representatives. Broker dealers filing FOCUS reports with the SEC had approximately $3.4 trillion in total assets and $204.6 billion in total capital for fiscal 2002.
• The SEC’s Division of Investment Management executes its responsibility through oversight and regulation of the U.S.’s $26 trillion investment management industry.
• More than 1,900 investment advisers to hedge funds are registered with the SEC and are subject to SEC examination.
• Companies holding over $10 million in assets whose securities are held by more than 500 owners are required to file annual and other periodic reports. These reports are made available to the public through the SEC’s EDGAR database.
• In 2006, the SEC provided training for conducting investigations, market surveillance and auditor oversight for more than 1,000 officials from 107 countries, including China, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Ecuador, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq.

Technical Overview

GotCoders developed a business intelligence platform for the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Office of Information Technology (OIT). Strategies were developed that draw information from enterprise systems, access databases, and flat files and aggregate the information in a central data store where the data is interrelated to enable analysis that spans departments and disciplines. The data is then migrated to Microsoft OLAP cubes and viewed by OIT knowledge workers via SharePoint Portal Server.

Custom scripts and Microsoft Data Transformation Services are used to acquire data from enterprise systems, access databases, and flat files. The data is migrated to a central data store (Microsoft SQL Server) for cleansing before it is transferred to the Microsoft OLAP cubes for processing. Microsoft OLAP is used to provide high speed, low-latency reporting on the large, gigabyte datasets which would be impossible otherwise.

SharePoint Portal Server is used to host web based reports that allow OIT knowledge workers to view and manipulate data. The portal is integrated with the SEC central user database (Active Directory) for single sign-on and access control which protects sensitive information. Users are able to create customized views of reports and export metrics from the portal to their documents.