Sagar Teotia, chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission, plans to leave the SEC at the end of February.
The SEC said Wednesday that Teotia will be concluding his tenure next month after six years at the commission. He has been leading the SEC’s Office of Chief Accountant since 2019 after serving as deputy chief accountant.
It is common for top SEC officials to leave with a new administration coming in, and a number of other SEC officials have announced their departures since the November election, including SEC chairman Jay Clayton, who will likely be succeeded by Gary Gensler, the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (
As chief accountant at the SEC, Teotia has functioned as the principal advisor to the Commission on accounting and auditing matters. He works closely with domestic and international private-sector accounting and auditing standard-setting bodies, including the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Since July 2019, he has co-chaired the Monitoring Group, a group of international financial institutions and audit regulatory bodies. Last July, the Monitoring Group published a set of recommendations to overhaul the international audit and ethics standard-setting process at the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board and the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants.
“I greatly appreciate Sagar’s strong and accomplished leadership of OCA, including leading the office during the challenging COVID-19 environment,” Roisman said in a statement. “Sagar’s judgment and expertise — developed with significant credibility and experience in both the public and private sectors — has been critical in allowing the Commission and OCA to advance a number of very consequential improvements to financial reporting and the auditing standards. These improvements have been effected both domestically and internationally, while always maintaining a commitment to investor protection.”
Teotia was involved in issuing guidance for companies and their accountants on how to deal with financial reporting amid the COVID-19 pandemic, giving practitioners more time to file their quarterly reports and account for the impact of the pandemic on their company's financials. He also has worked on the new auditor independence rules issued by the SEC last year.
“It has been an absolute honor to work with so many talented professionals at the SEC,” Teotia said in a statement. “I am beyond thankful to Chairman Clayton and Acting Chairman Roisman for giving me this incredible opportunity to serve investors. In my time here, I have been consistently amazed at my colleagues in OCA whose tireless work has contributed so much to the overall financial reporting system and investor protection more broadly. I have been particularly impressed by their efforts during the COVID-19 environment where their work has helped to foster the orderly flow of high quality financial information to investors. Simply put, I am immensely proud of what we have achieved over the last few years, and I am forever grateful for my time at the Commission.”
