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 fourteen 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, Wagner has reintroduced it — this time as freestanding legislation, from the chair of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over it.
Title VIII cuts corporate fines by redefining a word
This one gets no mention in the press release at all, and it may matter more.
Federal securities law fines companies per violation. Title VIII changes what counts as one. Under Wagner's bill, added to four separate places in the Securities Act and the Securities Exchange Act:
"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 applies to every enforcement action the agency brings.
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
- Commerce Bancshares — $45,000
- Robinhood Markets, the trading app
She writes the rules for the SEC. 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 parts of the package that are genuinely about capital formation — cost-benefit analysis of SEC rules, minimum public comment periods, a GAO cybersecurity audit — are the parts the press release describes. The two provisions with real money attached go unmentioned.
That's the tell. When a bill's sponsor describes seven of nine titles, look at the other two.
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, made trafficking investigations harder. 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.
Source
H.R. 9329 — SEC Reform and Restructuring Act, 119th Congress, introduced by Rep. Ann Wagner, June 18, 2026. Photo: official congressional portrait.
