Chairman Mary L. Shapiro's Opening Statement at SEC Open Meeting: Consolidated Audit Trail

Chairman Mary Schapiro began the SEC's Open Meeting by emphasizing the benefits of implementing a consolidated audit trail, including:

• Increasing the data available to regulators investigating illegal activities, such as insider trading, wash sales and market manipulation;
• Improving the ability of regulators to reconstruct broad-based market events in an accurate and timely manner;
• Increasing the ability of regulators to monitor overall market structure, so that both the Commission and the SRO's can be better informed about how rules are affecting markets;
• Reducing the data production burdens of SROs and broker-dealers by decreasing the number and types of ad hoc requests made by regulators.