The Securities and Exchange Commission’s information czar is leaving after a short run that was eventful for all the wrong reasons.
The SEC said Charles Boucher, its chief information officer, will leave after just a year and a half on the job. The SEC didn’t name a successor.
The agency said Boucher – who joined the agency after stints at Morgan Stanley, Standard & Poor’s, Salomon Brothers and Chase Manhattan — intends to prepare for ordination as a deacon in his church next spring.
Boucher’s time in Washington can’t have been made more pleasant by the unfortunate timing of his arrival, or by his failure to deliver on his high-flown promises.
A Dec. 9, 2008, press release announcing his appointment quotes him saying his goal was “to make the SEC a model, not just for government agencies, but for the use of information technology and services across the financial sector.”
So much for that. Two days later, another SEC press release reported that Bernard Madoff had been charged with running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme on his investors. That case — in which the SEC spent years studiously ignoring the warnings of at least one whistleblower — has come to be seen as epitomizing the agency’s failure to aggressively pursue wrongdoers.
Obviously, Boucher played no role in the SEC’s failures to bring Madoff to justice before the stolen money ran out, and the failures in that case weren’t primarily technological ones in any event.
That said, it seems clear that the upgrade Boucher was overseeing wasn’t exactly going swimmingly. The statement announcing his departure notes that “among other information technology initiatives during Mr. Boucher’s tenure, the agency began to revamp its systems for reviewing tips, complaints, and referrals.” Better late than never.