The Bahamas Ministry of Finance hosted a two-day workshop on FATCA in Nassau on April 9 and 10, which representatives from over 10 countries throughout the Caribbean and Central America attended. Danielle Rolfes, International Tax Counsel at the U.S. Treasury Department, Michael Danilack, Deputy Commissioner (International) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, and several other Treasury and IRS officials also attended the conference and met in bilateral discussions with various countries at the conference. In his opening remarks at the Conference, L. Ryan Pinder, Bahamas Minister of Financial

The CFTC announced that Jonathan L. Marcus has been named General Counsel. Marcus has served at the CFTC for the past two years as the Deputy General Counsel for Litigation. View Press Release in full here (links externally to CFTC website). For a compilation of recent news items relating to personnel changes, primarily at the regulators, including as to the departure of Mr. Marcus' predecessor, Dan Berkovitz, link to Current Topics - Personnel.

The CFTC and the SEC (collectively, the "Commissions") are jointly issuing final rules and guidelines to require certain registrants to establish programs to address identity theft. These rules and guidelines implement provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, which amended section 615(e) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and directed the Commissions to adopt rules requiring entities that are subject to the Commissions' respective enforcement authorities to address identity theft. The rules apply to essentially all of the financial intermediaries regulated by the two Commissions. According to the CFTC

The CFTC issued an Order requiring Interactive Brokers LLC ("IB"), an FCM and Retail Foreign Exchange Dealer, to pay a $225,000 civil monetary penalty for violations of the CFTC's segregation and supervision requirements. IB was faulted for failing to compute daily, on a currency-by-currency basis, the amount of customer funds required to be on deposit and the amount of customer funds actually on deposit in segregated accounts on behalf of commodity and options customers; failing to maintain sufficient U.S. dollars ("USD") in customer segregated accounts in the United States to meet all USD

CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler delivered a speech on the CFTC's Fiscal Year 2014 Budget Submission. The budget estimates the need for an appropriation of $315 million. Chairman Gensler described the amount as only a $7 million increase in funding over the President’s FY 2013 Budget of $308 million. However, in a dissenting statement, Commissioner O'Malia described the request as "improbable"; "an increase of 52 percent above the current funding level of $206.6 [million]." Commissioner O'Malia went on to say, "[g]iven the vast deficit spending challenges this country is facing, I do not believe it