The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said the proposed revised schedule of fees and charges on transactions made with the commission was the result of a thorough and careful study.
The SEC made this statement in response to the opposition of business groups on the proposal which they called objectionable and burdensome.
SEC said it is set to meet today with business leaders “to unite the viewpoints of the Commission and its stakeholders toward ensuring the new schedule of fees continues to advance the Marcos administration’s thrust of promoting business and capital formation in the country.”
“Any policy must be thoroughly discussed and debated. Accordingly, public consultation has been integral in the policy-making process of the SEC, in line and even beyond the requirements of the law. The SEC looks forward to meeting the business groups for an opportunity to be clarified on certain data and statements in their letter, including the use of non-comparable values, and generalization of Supreme Court rulings,” the Commission said.
However, SEC said a dedicated committee was constituted to assess the current fees and charges in relation to operating costs to ensure the sustainability of the Commission’s services and fulfillment of its legal mandate.
The SEC noted its fees and charges were last updated in 2017, based on a proposal from 2014.
“This means that the current rates are based on operational and administrative costs prevailing almost 10 years ago,” it said.
The SEC said it is among the few securities commissions in the world performing a dual mandate as registrar of corporations and securities regulator, which require more resources.
It noted that report by the Daiwa Institute of Research dated November 2020 that highlighted the need to strengthen SEC’s departments and offices involved in the development of the capital market, given the lack of personnel for market regulation.
“In comparison to its peers the SEC Philippines, in 2019, only had a total of 107 personnel performing capital market-related functions; while SEC Thailand and Securities Commission Malaysia had 571 and 628 personnel, respectively. To further drive the point, Australia’s Securities and Investment Commission, which wears a similar dual hat of corporate and markets regulator, had a workforce dedicated to market regulation of 1,011, almost ten times the staffing complement of the SEC Philippines,” it said.
The Daiwa study also noted that the local SEC face much lower budget by nearly one-fourth than the neighboring Asean regulators with relatively similar mandates.
“The SEC needs to expand and enhance its institutional capacity while embarking on the digital transformation of its services — as also mandated by the Revised Corporation Code of the Philippines — including the development and implementation of an electronic filing and monitoring system, in line with the zero-contact policy embodied in the Ease of Doing Business and Efficient Government Service Delivery Act of 2018,” the agency said.
