An Office of One - Revisited

For those who have been keeping up with The ERM Current™ this month, you might recall the blog from October 9 titled "An Office of One".   It details the Security and Exchange Commission's approach to risk management and the impact of cutting the office of risk management back to one person.  Well, in reading some earlier thoughts from former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, it seems that the vision for Enterprise Risk Management at the SEC was much broader and simply suffered under the current administration of Chairman Christopher Cox.   As Mr. Pitt explained in a Compliance Week article earlier this year, 

My years in government have taught me that government seems far more adept at examining the past than anticipating the future. When I became chairman of the SEC in 2001, for example, the agency had never—not once in its nearly seven decades—ever conducted a top-down management review of efficiency and processes. While the result of the review I commissioned recommended the creation of a risk-management group within the SEC, this recommendation has taken years to implement, and even then with a paucity of resources that makes the effort almost worse than never having undertaken it.

Mr. Pitt deserves credit for his vision.  If only he had been around longer to have seen it fully implemented, we may have been experiencing different and much less severe consequences today.