Reg Tracker: February 15 through February 29

The Cabinet Regulatory Tracker provides a list of significant effective dates, comment deadlines and compliance deadlines. Click on the links below to view deadlines from February 15 through February 29.

Effective Dates

• February 16: Interim amendments to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection regulations to implement the preferential tariff treatment and other customs-related provisions of the United States-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

• February 22: Rule change to amend FINRA Rules 2310, 5110 and NASD Rule 2340 relating to per-share estimated valuations for unlisted direct participation programs and real estate investment trust securities.

• February 25: FERC amendments to its regulations governing market-based rates for public utilities pursuant to the Federal Power Act in order to permit the sale of primary frequency response services at market-based rates by sellers with market-based rate authority for the sales of energy and capacity.

Comment Deadlines

• February 16: Initial comment deadline for the following SEC proposals: (i) new Rule 13q-1 adopted under Section 1504, and (ii) an amendment to Form SD to implement Section 1504 ("Disclosure of Payments by Resource Extraction Issuers") of the Dodd-Frank Act.

• February 16: Office of the Comptroller of the Currency-proposed rule to establish guidelines for recovery planning by banks, which would apply to insured national banks, insured federal savings associations, and insured federal branches of foreign banks with average total consolidated assets of $50 billion or more.

• February 16: FINRA proposal to (i) delete Rule 4552 from the FINRA rulebook, (ii) amend Rules 6110 and 6610 to add provisions regarding FINRA's publication of alternative trading system volume and trade count information for equity securities, and (iii) amend Rules 6183 and 6625.

• February 18: FINRA Amendment No. 1 to the proposed adoption of (i) FINRA Funding Portal Rules 100, 110, 200, 300, 800, 900 and 1200 (collectively, the ''Funding Portal Rules'') and related forms, and (ii) new FINRA Rule 4518 in the FINRA rulebook.

• February 18: SEC request for comments on whether the adopted interim final amendments to the rules and forms that implement Sections 71003 and 84001 of the Fixing America's Surface Transportation ("FAST") Act (H.R. 22) should be expanded to include other registrants and forms.

• February 19: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System policy statement on the framework that it will follow in setting the amount of the U.S. countercyclical capital buffer for advanced approaches to bank holding companies, savings and loan holding companies, and state member banks under Regulation Q (12 C.F.R. part 217).

• February 19: The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System extension of the comment period for its proposed total-loss absorbing capacity, long-term debt and clean holding company requirements for (i) systemically important U.S. bank holding companies and (ii) the intermediate holding companies of systemically important foreign banking organizations.

• February 22: CFTC amendment to Rule 1.35(a) to reduce certain recordkeeping requirements imposed on end users and generally to codify existing no-action relief provided by CFTC staff.

• February 22: CFTC draft technical specifications for swap data reporting that include (i) 80 enumerated questions posed to commenters that address 120 elements for swap data reporting, and (ii) swap data elements that currently are not reportable under CFTC Part 45 and may assist the CFTC in fulfilling its regulatory mandates.

• February 22: Information Collection Request that was made under CFTC Rule 3.3, which requires each futures commission merchant, swap dealer or major swap participant to file a Form 8-R in order to designate the chief compliance officer.

• February 22: CFTC-proposed amendments to rules on system safeguards and on cybersecurity testing for designated contract markets, swap execution facilities, swap data repositories ("SDRs") and derivatives clearing organizations.

• February 22: SEC-proposed amendment to require SDRs to make security-based swap data available according to schemas that will (i) be published on the SEC's website, and (ii) reference the international industry standards' Financial products Markup Language ("FpML") and Financial Information eXchange Markup Language ("FIXML").

• February 22: In response to recent statutory changes eliminating a mandatory indemnification requirement, the SEC reopened the comment period for proposed amendments to SEA Rule 13n-4, which would allow various U.S. and non-U.S. regulators to access security-based swap data held by SEC-regulated security-based swap data repositories.

• February 25: MSRB-proposed amendments to Rule A-3 ("Membership on the Board") to lengthen the term of MSRB Board member service, change the number and size of Board classes, limit the number of consecutive terms for which a Board member can serve, eliminate the requirement that there be at least one municipal advisor representative per class that is not associated with a dealer, delete an obsolete transition provision and provide a technical update to the name of a Board committee.

• February 29: FINRA extension of implementation date for proposed amendments to FINRA Rule 6730 ("Transaction Reporting") to require that firms use a "No-Remuneration" indicator to identify those transactions for which a commission or markup/markdown is not reflected in a TRACE trade report.

• February 29: SEC Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking covers the following specific areas: (i) transfer agent registration and reporting requirements, (ii) the safeguarding of funds and securities, and (iii) the revision of obsolete or outdated rules. The Concept Release and Request for Comment addresses additional areas of specific SEC interest, including (i) the processing of book-entry securities, (ii) broker-dealer recordkeeping for beneficial owners, (iii) transfer agents to mutual funds and (iv) the administration of issuer plans.

Compliance Deadlines

• February 29: CFTC requirement that NFA members who claim an exemption from commodity pool operator registration affirm the applicable notice of exemption annually within 60 days of the calendar year end.

• February 29: FINRA annual audit report filing deadline for the period ending on December 31, 2015.

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