Ann Wagner Billionaires & Big Business Missouri

Ann Wagner's New Bill Would Abolish the Accounting Watchdog Created After Enron — and Cut the SEC's Fines

The Senate parliamentarian threw the PCAOB's elimination out of Trump's budget bill in June 2025. Wagner put it back in June 2026 as Title V of a nine-title SEC package — along with a rule that would let corporate lawbreakers be fined for one violation instead of hundreds.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 10, 2026

On June 18, 2026, Ann Wagner introduced H.R. 9329, the SEC Reform and Restructuring Act — a nine-title package rolling several members' bills into one. Her press release frames it as help for local business:

"I am committed to supporting local small businesses and the families that run them. The Biden Administration's SEC imposed a top-down regulatory process that made it much more challenging for employers to raise money and for families to invest."

Two of the nine titles have nothing to do with small businesses raising money. They are about what happens to big companies that break the law.

Title V abolishes the auditor watchdog

Title V is called "Streamlining Public Company Accounting Oversight." Here's the operative language:

"The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board shall terminate on the date that is 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act."

It also repeals Sections 104, 105, and 107 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — the sections covering inspections of audit firms, investigations and disciplinary proceedings, and SEC oversight of the Board — and folds what's left into an office inside the SEC's Chief Accountant.

The PCAOB is a nonprofit corporation established by Congress "to oversee the audits of public companies in order to protect investors." It has four jobs: register the accounting firms that audit public companies, set auditing standards, inspect those firms' audits, and investigate and discipline them when they break the rules.

The SEC's own investor glossary describes it as "a private-sector, nonprofit corporation created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to oversee accounting professionals who provide independent audit reports for publicly traded companies." Sarbanes-Oxley is the accounting-reform law Congress passed in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom collapses — audits nobody had independently checked.

This is the second attempt in thirteen months

Wagner isn't proposing something new. She's re-running a play that already failed.

The same policy was written into Trump's budget bill in 2025. Wagner voted for that bill on May 22, 2025, when it passed the House 215–214 with the PCAOB provision inside it.

Then it hit the Senate. On June 19, 2025, the Senate parliamentarian ruled the PCAOB provision could not ride through on a simple-majority budget bill because, as the Journal of Accountancy reported, it "proposes a policy change rather than a budget change." It was stripped out.

PCAOB Chair Erica Williams's reaction, quoted by CFO Brew, was that the ruling was "good news for millions of Americans whose retirement savings and investments would be put at risk by eliminating the PCAOB."

A year later it is back, as Title V of Wagner's package — outside the budget process, from the chair of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over it. The title is Bill Huizenga's bill; he is one of the package's original cosponsors.

Title VIII cuts corporate fines by redefining a word

This one is Pete Sessions' bill, carried inside Wagner's package. The press release names it and says nothing about what it does. It may matter more than anything else in the package.

Federal securities law fines companies per violation. Title VIII changes what counts as one. The same language is inserted in nine places across all four of the principal securities statutes — the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940:

"separate acts of noncompliance are a single violation when the acts are the result of— (A) a common or a substantially overlapping originating cause; (B) the same misstatement or omission; or (C) a continuing failure to comply."

Read that third clause again. A continuing failure to comply is one violation. A company that breaks a rule every day for three years, from one bad decision, gets counted once.

That is not a technical clarification. It's a cap on what the SEC can collect, written into statute, and it runs through the civil-penalty provisions of every statute the agency enforces — plus the Exchange Act's criminal-penalty section.

Who pays her

Wagner chairs the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets — the panel with jurisdiction over the SEC, over the PCAOB, and over securities enforcement.

The industries in that jurisdiction are among her largest funders. From her donor records:

Jones Financial Companies, the parent of Edward Jones — $48,750
KKR & Co., the private equity giant — $46,500
Robinhood Markets, the trading app — $34,000

Corporations cannot legally give to a federal candidate, so those totals are money from the firms' PACs, owners, employees and their families. She writes the rules for the SEC. The people at the companies the SEC polices write her checks. And her bill would shrink both the watchdog and the penalties.

What "small business" has to do with it

Nothing in Title V or Title VIII touches a small business. The PCAOB inspects the audits of public companies — firms listed on stock exchanges. The penalty provision governs SEC enforcement against securities-law violators, which is not where a family-run shop in Ballwin lives.

The press release does name both. It lists seven component bills, one line each, no description: the "Streamlining Public Company Accounting Oversight Act — Sponsored by Rep. Bill Huizenga" and the "Securities Enforcement Clarity Act — Sponsored by Rep. Pete Sessions" are the fifth and sixth of those seven entries. What either one actually does appears nowhere in the release. It is in a section-by-section PDF linked at the bottom, which describes Title V as terminating the PCAOB and Title VIII as treating "multiple acts of securities noncompliance as a single violation."

So the only prose in the announcement is Wagner's own statement, and every word of it is about small business, employers raising money and families investing. The two provisions with real money attached are a name on a list and a line in an attachment.

The pattern

This is the third time we've looked at a Wagner bill and found the headline and the text pointing in different directions. Her signature anti-trafficking law, FOSTA, was used in exactly one federal prosecution and, according to the GAO, was one of two April 2018 events that pushed the market overseas, where investigators found it harder to reach. Her Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, named for protections that have existed in federal law since 2002, adds five years in prison for doctors and a duty for their colleagues to report them.

Now a "small business" bill that abolishes the Enron watchdog.