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A 29-year-old Goldman Sachs executive was named Friday as managing executive of the US Securities Commission's enforcement division to beef up the fight against corporate fraud.
Adam Storch will act as the enforcement division's first-ever chief operating officer, a post created as part of a revamp announced earlier this year, said the SEC, a key financial markets watchdog.
Among other duties, he will supervise the SEC office of market intelligence -- improving the collection, analysis and monitoring of hundreds of thousands of tips, complaints and referrals that the agency receives each year, the commission said in a statement.
Storch joined the SEC from Goldman Sachs, where he was vice president in the business intelligence group of the Wall Street investment bank.
"He will help to make us more efficient and nimble and permit us to put more of our investigators on the front lines to detect and stop fraud," said SEC enforcement division director Robert Khuzami, to whom Storch will report directly.
Storch's recruitment was among changes made at the SEC following its failure to detect Bernard Madoff's massive Ponzi scheme.
But the choice of an executive from Goldman Sachs, one of the financial houses at the center of the financial crisis, to lead the SEC's enforcement arm raised some eyebrows in Washington.
"SEC names Goldman Sachs exec to enforcement post -- you can’t make it up," quipped Senator John McCain, a frequent critic of Wall Street’s business practices, in a post to the micro-blogging service Twitter.
