Harvey Pitt

Harvey L. Pitt (February 28, 1945 – May 30, 2023) was an American lawyer. He served as the 26th chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for 18 months from August 2001 to February 2003, a period that encompassed the September 11 attacks and the Enron scandal.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Pitt graduated from Brooklyn College with a bachelor's degree, and from St. John's University School of Law with a Juris Doctor. He then worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), eventually becoming the agency's general counsel. Pitt was later a partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, where he represented the Big Five accounting firms and other financial industry firms, before returning to the SEC as chairman.

During his tenure at the SEC, he was lauded by some for his response to the 9/11 attacks, and for crafting a new rule requiring large company executives to personally certify their company's financial results. However, he was criticized for requesting that his pay be increased and his job as SEC chairman be elevated to Cabinet rank, for being too slow to react to corporate scandals, for meeting privately with his former clients while they were subjects of SEC investigations, for being too close to the accounting industry, and for reversing his commitment to support highly qualified candidate John H. Biggs to head the new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. The final criticism of him, by both Democrats and Republicans, was that he attempted to appoint as head of the new accounting oversight board 78-year-old William Webster, who chaired the audit committee of a company under SEC investigation for fraud and accounting irregularities, while the company lacked internal controls—without informing the White House or the other SEC Commissioners that Webster was under scrutiny for his involvement in a corporate accounting fraud investigation. In November 2002, Pitt abruptly resigned under pressure as Chairman of the SEC, 15 months into what was to be a five-year term; he stepped down the following February. Harvey Pitt was one of the founding members of the SEC Historical Society in 1999, a non-profit organization that preserves and shares the history of the SEC and financial regulation.^[1] Later in his career, Pitt served as a columnist with Compliance Week, and as an expert witness.