For all the strides Mary Schapiro made after the disastrous tenure of Christopher Cox, the SEC is still tainted by the perception that it's a captive of Wall Street.

Once upon a time, Paul Daugerdas generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Jenkens & Gilchrist by blessing dubious tax shelter deals. Then the feds got wind of his role. In 2007 Daugerdas's tax shelter work led to the demise of his onetime firm. Now it's led to his indictment on tax fraud and conspiracy charges.

A report by the Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Inspector General examines the interactions between Enforcement Division Director Robert Khuzami and Citigroup's lawyer, Mark Pomerantz of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, during the negotiations that led to Citi's $75 million settlement last year. While the OIG cleared Khuzami of wrongdoing, the public version of this report leaves some big questions unanswered.

The former prosecutor was brought in to revive the SEC enforcement division at perhaps the lowest moment in the agency's history. Has he succeeded? Not yet, but he's working on it.

Deloitte's lawyers at Sidley Austin persuaded a judge in Manhattan that their client was duped like everyone else by alleged fraud at Longtop Financial, the U.S.-listed Chinese software company that collapsed in 2011 under the weight of a massive accounting scandal.