SEC Enforcement Actions Plummet.

The SEC filed 62 enforcement actions against public companies and their subsidiaries in the government's 2017 fiscal year, a 33 percent drop from a year earlier, according to a report from the Securities Enforcement Empirical Database.

The cause of the drop was that only 17 cases were filed in the second half of the year (April 1-Sept. 30), a period when the number of SEC actions usually increases.

Total monetary settlements against public company defendants also fell from the first half of fiscal 2017 to the second half, declining to $196 million from $1 billion.

In other findings from the report:

* "Issuer reporting and disclosure" continued to be the most frequent type of allegation...