Don’t blame Steve Cutler for feeling a little burned out. He’s been the nation’s top financial cop since October 2001, just two months before the collapse of Enron became the first in a wave of corporate and Wall Street scandals that has yet to subside. Now Cutler is stepping down as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement chief, leaving the job of prosecuting bad guys to a fresh face.
“As much as I love the work, I just felt in my gut that it was the right time,” says the 43-year-old securities lawyer, who joined the agency in 1999 as a deputy to former enforcement head Richard Walker. Cutler previously was a partner in powerful Washington law firm Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering.
But the California native has no plans to head back into private practice -- at least not yet. Instead, with what he describes as a “grueling” job behind him,
he’ll take a few months off to relax and figure out his next move.
In the meantime, he’s hopeful that his as-yet-unnamed successor will have an easier time than he did. Indeed, much of Cutler’s work focused on imposing stiffer penalties on financial flimflam artists in hopes of deterring future scams. During his tenure the agency recouped more than $6 billion from companies engaged in fraudulent business practices.
“My greatest hope,” he says, “is that we will see far fewer scandals going forward. If we have as many in the next five years as we’ve had in the past two or three, that would be really depressing.”
