SEC Enforcement Actions Database

To look up an enforcement action by its SEC release number, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the release number field (releaseNo). The value of releaseNo should equal the exact identifier the SEC assigned to the action, for example 2011-279 or 2017-133.

The response object echoes back the same releaseNo along with the publication date (releasedAt), the title (title), the original press release link (url), and any related court filings or orders attached to the action (resources). Because release numbers are unique, a successful lookup returns a single record.

To find all enforcement actions involving a specific publicly traded company by its stock ticker, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the ticker field inside the parties array (entities.ticker). The value of entities.ticker should equal the company's trading symbol, for example HAL for Halliburton or MYTAY for Magyar Telekom.

The ticker field is only populated when the party name was successfully matched to a known publicly traded company, so this filter targets corporate respondents and defendants rather than individuals. To page through every matching action, sort by publication date in descending order (releasedAt) and step the from offset forward by the page size (max 50).

To retrieve every enforcement action involving a specific company by its SEC identifier, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the CIK field inside the parties array (entities.cik). The value of entities.cik should equal the Central Index Key assigned to the company, for example 45012 for Halliburton or 1493318 for eToro.

Filtering by entities.cik is more reliable than filtering by ticker because the CIK never changes when a company rebrands or delists. The response includes every action where the company appears in any role (entities.role), so the same query catches matters where the company is a defendant, a respondent, or a settling party.

To pull every enforcement action published in a given year, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the publication date (releasedAt). The value of releasedAt should be between the first and last day of the target year, for example between 2022-01-01 and 2022-12-31. Sort the results by releasedAt in descending order so the page boundaries are stable.

The endpoint returns up to 50 records per page, controlled by the size parameter. To paginate, start with from at 0, then increase it by 50 on each subsequent call until the total.value count is reached. The from offset is capped at 10000; if a single year contains more than that, split the date range into shorter sub-windows (for example month by month) and paginate each window independently.

To monitor the most recently published actions in near real time, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and sort by the publication date (releasedAt) in descending order. The database is updated as new actions are published by the SEC, so a recurring poll of the top of the sort order surfaces newly added records.

A simple monitoring loop uses a match-all query such as the presence of any release number (the releaseNo field exists), keeps from at 0, and asks for the first page (up to 50 records). On each poll, compare the returned releaseNo values against the ones already seen and treat the unseen ones as new. A polling interval of around 60 seconds is sufficient because actions are published infrequently.

To find actions related to bribery or Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on either the topical tags array (tags) or the list of violated laws (violatedSections). Bribery cases commonly carry tags such as bribery, foreign corrupt practices, or FCPA violations, and the value of violatedSections typically contains a phrase such as Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) or books and records provisions of the FCPA.

Combining both filters with an OR catches cases that were tagged but not explicitly labeled with a statute, and vice versa. Each returned action also exposes a free-text summary (summary) and the underlying allegations (complaints) for further confirmation.

To search for insider-trading enforcement cases, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the topical tags array (tags). The value of tags should contain insider trading. The tag is applied when the SEC's release describes trading on material non-public information, so it captures both individual tipping cases and broader market-manipulation matters with an insider-trading component.

For a fuller view, the narrative complaint text (complaints) and the case title (title) often contain the phrase insider trading even on actions that were not tagged that way, so a free-text search of complaints can be used as a secondary check.

To list actions where the charged party agreed to a settlement, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the settlement flag (hasAgreedToSettlement). The value of hasAgreedToSettlement should be true.

This flag captures matters that were resolved without a contested trial, including consent orders and administrative settlements. The related field hasAgreedToPayPenalty indicates whether a monetary penalty was part of the settlement, and the specific dollar amounts and the party each was imposed on are listed under the penalties array (penaltyAmounts).

To find cases where the charged party agreed to pay a monetary penalty, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the penalty-agreed flag (hasAgreedToPayPenalty). The value of hasAgreedToPayPenalty should be true.

This filter narrows the result set to actions that include at least one financial sanction the defendant accepted. The actual amounts appear in the penalties array (penaltyAmounts), where each entry carries the cleaned numeric amount (penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmount), the original text as the SEC stated it (penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmountText), and the party the penalty was imposed on (penaltyAmounts.imposedOn).

To identify the largest enforcement penalties ever imposed, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and sort or rank results on the numeric penalty amount inside the penalties array (penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmount). Each action can carry multiple entries in penaltyAmounts, so a single record may contribute several values; the party each amount was levied against is named on the same object under penaltyAmounts.imposedOn.

Because an action can have several penalty entries (one per defendant or one per type of sanction), build the ranking by flattening penaltyAmounts across all returned actions and ordering the flattened list by penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmount in descending order. The corresponding action context, including the title (title), release number (releaseNo), and publication date (releasedAt), comes from the parent record.

To total the penalty dollars imposed on a single company across all its SEC actions, first pull every action that involves the company by querying the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint with a filter on the CIK or ticker (entities.cik or entities.ticker). The value of entities.cik should equal the company's CIK, for example 45012 for Halliburton.

Then iterate the penalties array on each returned action (penaltyAmounts) and keep only the entries where the party named on the penalty (penaltyAmounts.imposedOn) matches the company's name. Sum the numeric amounts (penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmount) across all kept entries. Filtering on imposedOn is necessary because the same action can also list penalties imposed on individual officers or co-defendants that should not be counted toward the company total.

To find actions that were brought in parallel with criminal charges by the Department of Justice, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the parallel actions array (parallelActionsTakenBy). The value of parallelActionsTakenBy should contain U.S. Department of Justice.

This field lists the other agencies that took related action on the same underlying conduct, so a match indicates a coordinated civil-and-criminal posture. Related agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation are sometimes added to the same array, and the broader list of cooperating bodies (otherAgenciesInvolved) can be inspected for additional context on the investigation.

To locate actions where international regulators cooperated with the SEC, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the cooperating agencies array (otherAgenciesInvolved). The value of otherAgenciesInvolved.country should be anything other than United States. Examples of non-US cooperators that appear on the records include Hungarian Financial Supervisory Authority (Hungary), German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) (Germany), and Swiss Office of the Attorney General (Switzerland).

The name of each cooperating body sits alongside the country on the same object (otherAgenciesInvolved.name), so the response identifies both the foreign regulator and the jurisdiction. Pairing this filter with a tag such as foreign corrupt practices narrows the set to cross-border bribery matters specifically.

To search for cases that violate a specific securities law section, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the list of violated laws (violatedSections). The value of violatedSections should contain the text of the statute or rule, for example Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), or books and records provisions of the FCPA.

Because violatedSections is stored as free-text strings extracted from the SEC's release, a partial phrase match (for example Section 10(b)) works well to capture variations in how the SEC cites the same statute. Each returned action also exposes the underlying allegations (complaints) and the requested remedies (requestedRelief) so the legal posture of the case is visible.

To find actions where the SEC requested disgorgement of profits, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the requested remedies array (requestedRelief). The value of requestedRelief should contain disgorgement of profits (or the closely related disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, which appears on some older releases).

The requestedRelief array often lists multiple remedies on the same action, such as prejudgment interest, civil penalties, permanent injunctions, or cease and desist order. Combining this filter with the settlement flag (hasAgreedToSettlement) separates contested disgorgement requests from those resolved by consent.

To distinguish actions targeted at companies from those targeted at individuals, look at the party-type field inside the parties array (entities.type). The value of entities.type is company for corporate respondents and individual for natural persons; a third value, other, covers parties that fit neither.

Querying the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint with a filter where entities.type should equal company returns matters with at least one corporate defendant, and the same query with entities.type set to individual returns matters with at least one individual defendant. A single action commonly lists both types together — for example a company and its named executives — so the two queries overlap on mixed matters.

To find cases naming a specific individual as a defendant, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the entity name combined with the role inside the parties array. The value of entities.name should equal the person's full name, for example Jeannot Lorenz, and the value of entities.role should be defendant.

Both conditions need to apply to the same entry inside entities, so this is a nested filter rather than two independent filters at the document level. The response includes the broader context of the matter — the title (title), summary (summary), and any co-defendants in the same entities array — so it is straightforward to see the company or other individuals named alongside the target person.

To retrieve the original SEC press release link and the related court filings for an action, look at the press release URL on the top-level object (url) and the related-documents array (resources). The url field points to the original SEC press release page; for older matters this is on sec.gov/news/press/... and for newer matters it is on sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/....

Each entry inside resources carries a human-readable label (resources.label) and a direct link to the document (resources.url). Typical labels include SEC Complaint, SEC Order, Litigation Release No. LR-22213, and amended-rule documents for non-enforcement releases. Querying the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint for a specific release number (releaseNo) returns a single record whose url and resources together provide the complete document trail.

To search the narrative text of charges and complaints, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the complaints array (complaints). Each element of complaints is a sentence-level description of a specific allegation, such as Magyar Telekom paid approximately $9 million through four sham contracts to funnel money to government officials in Montenegro.

A free-text term match against complaints finds actions whose allegations mention a given concept, party, or scheme. Combining this with a phrase from the case summary (summary) or title (title) tightens the match when the same word appears in many unrelated matters. The complaint sentences are returned in full on the response, so the matching context is visible without dereferencing the original PDF.

To find actions led by a specific SEC attorney or investigator, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on either the investigation team (investigationConductedBy) or the litigation team (litigationLedBy). Each field is an array of names; the value should equal the staffer's full name, for example Charles Cain or Melissa R. Hodgman.

The two arrays serve different roles: investigationConductedBy lists the staff that gathered facts and prepared the case, while litigationLedBy lists the attorneys that argued or settled it. Some matters list multiple people in each role. A union over the two fields catches every action a given staffer touched, regardless of which side of the workflow they were on.

To filter actions by industry sector, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the topical tags array (tags). The value of tags should contain the sector descriptor — for example hedge fund for hedge fund matters, telecommunications for telecom matters, or binary options for retail-fraud schemes built around a particular product.

The tags field captures both the industry and the nature of the misconduct, so a sector tag often appears alongside a charge-type tag such as improper expense allocations or disclosure fraud. Browsing the distinct values that appear on tags across an initial page of results helps identify which sector labels the SEC uses in practice.

To find cases involving multiple defendants and list every charged party, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and inspect the parties array on each returned action (entities). Iterate through entities and keep entries where the role (entities.role) is defendant. Each kept entry carries the party's name (entities.name), party type (entities.type, either company or individual), and optionally the ticker (entities.ticker) and CIK (entities.cik) when the party matches a publicly traded company.

To restrict the query to matters with more than one defendant in the first place, target multi-party releases by filtering on a known co-defendant (entities.name) or by checking whether the parallel actions array (parallelActionsTakenBy) is non-empty, since coordinated matters typically name several parties.

To separate defendants from settling parties within the same action, look at the role field inside the parties array (entities.role). The value of entities.role is one of defendant, settling party, respondent, or other. A single action can mix these — for example, a release may name some parties as defendant and others as settling party when only a subset agreed to terms.

Querying the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint returns the full entities array on each action, so the separation is done client-side by filtering entities on the desired role value. The action-level flag for whether any party agreed to settle (hasAgreedToSettlement) tells you whether the action contains settling parties at all before you bother to split the array.

To track trends in SEC enforcement activity over time, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint for one year at a time using the publication date filter (releasedAt). The value of releasedAt should be between January 1 and December 31 of the target year, for example between 2019-01-01 and 2019-12-31. The response object's total count (total.value) reports the number of matching actions, which is the annual volume.

Repeating the query year by year and recording each total.value produces a time series of enforcement activity. To break the trend down further by topic, layer in a tag filter (tags) or a violated-section filter (violatedSections) and re-run the per-year sweep for that subcategory. Sorting the underlying results by releasedAt ascending lets you also reconstruct the within-year cadence.

To rank the most common types of charges or themes, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint over the desired time window (filtering on releasedAt) and tally the values that appear in the topical tags array (tags) across the result set. Each action carries multiple tags such as bribery, insider trading, disclosure fraud, whistleblower awards, or hedge fund, so the tally counts tag occurrences rather than actions.

A companion view comes from tallying the violated-laws array (violatedSections), which reflects the statutory framing — for example Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) or Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 — rather than the thematic framing. Paginating through the result set with from stepping by 50 ensures the tally covers every action, not just the first page.

To combine multiple filters, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint with a compound condition. For FCPA cases that ended in a settlement within a date window, the violated-laws array (violatedSections) should contain Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the settlement flag (hasAgreedToSettlement) should be true, and the publication date (releasedAt) should be between the start and end of the target window, for example between 2018-01-01 and 2022-12-31.

All three conditions must hold on the same action. The query syntax supports boolean composition across these fields, so they can be joined in a single request rather than fetched separately and intersected client-side. The response includes the full set of matching records with the dollar penalties (penaltyAmounts), parties (entities), and complaint narrative (complaints) available for downstream analysis.

To sort actions from oldest to newest, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and order results by the publication date (releasedAt) in ascending order. The endpoint sorts by releasedAt descending by default, so overriding the sort direction is required.

Note that records prior to 2012 only carry the date portion of releasedAt (for example 2011-12-29), while later records carry a full timestamp with a timezone offset (for example 2024-08-27T13:30:00-04:00). The ascending sort handles both shapes correctly because they share the same lexicographic prefix. To rebuild a complete historical timeline, paginate by stepping from forward by 50 until every record is retrieved.

To retrieve a complete dump of every action published since 1997, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint repeatedly using narrow date windows on the publication date (releasedAt) and paginating within each window. The from offset is capped at 10000, so any window whose total count would exceed that cap must be split into smaller sub-windows.

A practical approach is to sweep year by year from 1997 forward: for each year, the value of releasedAt should be between January 1 and December 31 of that year, sorted ascending. Step from by 50 until the page is empty or the year's total.value is reached. If a single year's total exceeds the offset cap, split that year into quarters or months and repeat. Together this yields the full historical set without any window hitting the pagination ceiling.

To find whistleblower-related announcements, query the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint and filter on the topical tags array (tags). The value of tags should contain whistleblower awards. The matching records cover SEC press releases that announce awards to tipsters whose information led to successful enforcement actions.

When present, the dollar figures appear in the penalties array (penaltyAmounts), with the numeric amount on penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmount and the original text on penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmountText. Because award announcements often omit the structured fields used on charging documents, some records carry only the title (title) and summary (summary) with the dollar figure stated in the title text itself (for example SEC Issues Awards Totaling $98 Million to Two Whistleblowers). For those records, parsing the amount from title or summary is the fallback.

To compute the total dollars the SEC has ordered in penalties for a given category of misconduct, first pull every action in that category by querying the /sec-enforcement-actions endpoint with a filter on either the violated-laws array (violatedSections) or the topical tags array (tags). For FCPA cases, the value of violatedSections should contain Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), or the value of tags should contain foreign corrupt practices or FCPA violations.

Then paginate through the full result set by stepping from by 50, and on each returned action sum the numeric penalty amounts inside the penalties array (penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmount). The grand total is the sum of penaltyAmounts.penaltyAmount across every entry in every matching action. The party each amount was imposed on sits on the same object (penaltyAmounts.imposedOn), so the total can also be broken down per defendant if needed.