Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-13-05137/USCOURTS-caDC-13-05137-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 442
Nature of Suit: Civil Rights Employment
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued September 5, 2014 Decided November 14, 2014

No. 13-5137

PUBLIC INVESTORS ARBITRATION BAR ASSOCIATION,

APPELLANT

v.

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION,

APPELLEE

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 1:11-cv-02285)

Julie A. Murray argued the cause for appellant. With her on 

the briefs was Daniel A. Ball.

Brian Wolfman was on the brief for amici curiae Citizens 

for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, et al., in support of 

appellant.

Karen J. Shimp, Special Trial Counsel, U.S. Securities and 

Exchange Commission, argued the cause for appellee. With her 

on the brief were Melinda Hardy, Assistant General Counsel, 

and Sarah E. Hancur, Senior Counsel. Kathleen Cody, Senior 

Counsel, entered an appearance.

USCA Case #13-5137 Document #1522260 Filed: 11/14/2014 Page 1 of 18
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Before: TATEL and BROWN, Circuit Judges, and 

SILBERMAN, Senior Circuit Judge.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge TATEL.

Concurring opinion filed by Circuit Judge BROWN.

TATEL, Circuit Judge: Exemption 8 of the Freedom of 

Information Act protects from disclosure records “related to 

examination . . . reports prepared by, on behalf of, or for the use 

of an agency responsible for the regulation or supervision of 

financial institutions.” Congress has now clarified that the 

Securities and Exchange Commission is such an agency and—

central to the issue before us—that the Financial Industry 

Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a private organization that 

oversees securities arbitrations, is such an institution. In this 

case, the Commission argues that Exemption 8 allows it to 

withhold documents it collected while examining FINRA’s 

program for arbitrating disputes between securities brokers and 

their customers. The district court agreed, and, for the reasons 

set forth in this opinion, so do we.

I.

The Exchange Act of 1934 authorizes the Commission to 

delegate “certain governmental functions to private [selfregulatory organizations].” In re Series 7 Broker Qualification 

Exam Scoring Litigation, 548 F.3d 110, 114 (D.C. Cir. 2008). 

Pursuant to this sort of delegation, FINRA enforces securities 

rules with respect to its members—securities brokers and dealers 

doing business with the public. FINRA also facilitates nearly all

securities-related arbitrations and mediations in the United 

States. In those arbitration proceedings, the parties are presented 

with a list of arbitrators, may strike available arbitrators under 

certain conditions, and must rank the remaining ones in order of 

USCA Case #13-5137 Document #1522260 Filed: 11/14/2014 Page 2 of 18
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preference. FINRA collects those lists and appoints a panel 

made up of the arbitrators with the best combined rankings. 

The Commission has “broad authority” to oversee FINRA’s 

practices “relating to customer disputes, including the power to 

mandate the adoption of any rules [the agency] deems necessary 

to ensure that arbitration procedures adequately protect statutory 

rights.” Shearson/American Express, Inc. v. McMahon, 482 U.S. 

220, 233–34 (1987). That oversight may take the form of such 

“reasonable periodic, special, or other examinations” as the 

Commission “deems necessary or appropriate in the public 

interest.” 15 U.S.C. § 78q (also known as Exchange Act § 17). 

Drawing on this authority, the Commission’s Market Oversight 

Program inspects FINRA’s arbitration services and recommends 

policy changes when appropriate. See U.S. Government 

Accountability Office, GAO–12–625, Securities Regulation: 

Opportunities Exist to Improve SEC’s Oversight of the Financial 

Industry Regulatory Authority 10–11, 18–19 (2012). 

Appellant, the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association

(PIABA), is an organization whose members represent 

individual investors in disputes with securities brokers. As part 

of its mission, PIABA promotes the arbitration-related interests 

of its constituents. In pursuit of that goal, PIABA sent the 

Commission a FOIA request seeking records related to the 

agency’s audits, inspections, and reviews of FINRA’s arbitration 

program. 

Acting on that request, the Commission searched its 

archives and identified 65 boxes containing potentially 

responsive records, most of which concern the agency’s 

responses to consumer complaints about FINRA’s arbitration 

process. But it refused to turn those documents over to PIABA, 

claiming that the requested records were all protected from 

disclosure under Exemption 8. That provision allows the 

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Commission to withhold records that are “contained in or related 

to [its] examination . . . reports.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(8). 

Concluding that it collected all responsive documents while 

examining FINRA’s arbitration program—including during 

several inquiries it initiated in response to consumer 

complaints—the Commission denied PIABA’s FOIA request 

and its subsequent administrative appeal. 

With these administrative proceedings behind it, PIABA 

sued the Commission in the United States District Court for the 

District of Columbia, and the parties cross-moved for summary 

judgment. The district court granted the Commission’s motion, 

concluding that the requested records “relate[] to” the agency’s

“examinations” of FINRA and that Exemption 8 therefore 

protects them from disclosure. Public Investors Arbitration Bar 

Association v. SEC, 930 F. Supp. 2d 55 (D.D.C. 2013). In 

arriving at this conclusion, the district court rejected PIABA’s 

two main contentions: that Exemption 8 protects only 

information related to financial examinations and so does not 

apply to the Commission’s oversight of FINRA’s arbitration 

program; and that the agency failed to identify a particular report 

to which each contested document relates. Addressing the first 

argument, the district court relied on what it called Exemption 

8’s “plain meaning” and purpose, as well as its relationship to 

other financial legislation. It emphasized that Exemption 8

nowhere distinguishes between a regulated entity’s financial and 

administrative activities, and it found that applying Exemption 8 

in this case would serve the enacting Congress’s stated purpose 

of protecting the cooperative relationship between the 

Commission and the entities it regulates, including FINRA. Id.

at 63–67. As for PIABA’s second argument—that not every 

“potentially responsive document . . . relate[s] to [a particular] 

examination report of some kind”—the district court held that 

nothing in Exemption 8 requires the Commission to point to any 

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such specific report. In any event, the district court found, the 

Commission had in fact met that burden, pointing out that the 

agency had conducted its inquiries into PIABA’s arbitration 

program under its examination authority and that each 

investigation “resulted in a writing, either termed a report or 

closing memorandum.” Id. at 70–72.

PIABA now appeals. “We review the district court’s 

disposition on summary judgment de novo. In the FOIA context 

this requires that we ascertain whether the agency has sustained 

its burden of demonstrating that the documents requested are . . . 

exempt from disclosure under [] FOIA.” ACLU v. DOJ, 655 

F.3d 1, 5 (D.C. Cir. 2011) (citations and internal quotation 

marks omitted). “[B]ecause FOIA’s terms apply governmentwide,” moreover, “we generally decline to accord deference to 

agency interpretations of the statute, as we would otherwise do 

under Chevron.” Al-Fayed v. CIA, 254 F.3d 300, 307 (D.C. Cir. 

2001).

II.

Read beginning to end, FOIA Exemption 8 protects 

information “contained in or related to examination, operating, 

or condition reports prepared by, on behalf of, or for the use of 

an agency responsible for the regulation or supervision of 

financial institutions.” 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(8). Although the 

exemption is a mouthful, Congress has gone to some trouble to 

spell things out. It has made clear, for example, that “[f]or the 

purpose of FOIA, the Commission is an agency responsible for 

the regulation or supervision of financial institutions,” and it has 

confirmed that “any entity . . . the Commission is responsible for 

regulating, supervising, or examining under [the Exchange Act] 

is a financial institution.” 15 U.S.C. § 78x(e). Here, the 

Commission does not argue that the requested records pertain to 

operating or condition reports. To resolve this case, then, we 

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need determine only whether the requested records are 

“contained in or related to” an “examination report” that 

Exemption 8 covers. That inquiry proceeds in two parts: we first 

address whether the contested records implicate a relevant 

Commission “examination” and, if they do, we then ask whether 

they relate to a particular “report.”

Examination

Although insisting that Exemption 8 provides no protection 

for the records it seeks, PIABA has strikingly little evidence for 

that claim. The organization begins with a cursory nod to the 

exemption’s text, arguing that “examination report” is “not part 

of common parlance” but rather is an “industry-specific” term 

with a “special or technical meaning.” Appellant’s Br. at 22–24. 

Accordingly, it urges us to read the phrase as a “term of art,” 

rather than as a general definition that applies to all agencies in 

all situations. Id. Such precise, industry-specific meaning, 

PIABA admits, does not emanate from the text of the statute—

or, indeed, from anything else in the U.S. Code. 

To tease out the words’ specific meaning, PIABA goes

directly to Exemption 8’s legislative history, which it claims

reveals that Congress intended to protect only financial 

information and not “reviews or inspections of a purely 

administrative function of a[] self-regulatory organization like 

FINRA.” Id. at 24. Guided by that narrow meaning, PIABA 

emphasizes that the records at issue here have no bearing on 

FINRA’s financial transactions or its fiscal condition. Instead, 

they “concern FINRA’s management of its arbitrator pool, its 

selection and evaluation of those arbitrators, and the adequacy of 

arbitrators’ disclosures.” Id. at 32. The requested documents, 

PIABA concludes, therefore do not qualify as the type of 

examination reports Congress wrote Exemption 8 to protect.

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By contrast, the Commission largely sticks to the text of 

Exemption 8 and related statutes. The word “examination,” the 

Commission tells us, is not at all “obscure.” Appellee’s Br. at 

12. Instead, the term has a plain meaning unencumbered by 

context. Indeed, the Commission argues, neither Exemption 8 

nor the agency’s enabling legislation or regulations limit the 

meaning of “examination” to the purely financial. Id. (citing 15 

U.S.C. § 78q(b); 17 C.F.R. § 240.17a-1). 

To resolve this debate, we begin, as always, with the 

statute’s text—and, in particular, with the word “examination.”

See Consumers Union of United States, Inc. v. Heimann, 589 

F.2d 531, 533 (D.C. Cir. 1978) (in FOIA cases, “a reviewing 

court must accord first priority in statutory interpretation to the 

plain meaning of the provision in question”). Mindful of that 

canon of construction, this court has explained time and again 

that Exemption 8’s scope is “particularly broad.” Id. Rejecting 

the claim that Exemption 8 protects only documents whose 

disclosure would harm bank depositors, for example, we 

observed that the exemption’s “broad, all-inclusive scope” 

allows us to apply the statute “as written”—that is, without 

adding any extra requirements—“since Congress ha[s] 

‘intentionally and unambiguously’ so contemplated.” Gregory v. 

FDIC, 631 F.2d 896, 898 (D.C. Cir. 1980) (per curiam) (quoting 

Consumers Union, 589 F.2d at 533). We reached this conclusion 

despite the general rule requiring that we interpret FOIA’s

exemptions narrowly. See Vaughn v. Rosen, 484 F.2d 820, 823 

(D.C. Cir. 1973). After all, “it is not [this Court’s] function, even 

in the FOIA context, to subvert” the plain meaning of the statute. 

Consumers Union, 589 F.2d at 533.

In this case, the statute’s plain meaning is all but conclusive. 

Guided by the dictionary, we think it quite clear that

“examination” reports encompass any report stemming from the 

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Commission “inspect[ing] closely” or “inquir[ing] carefully”

into something. WEBSTER’S NEW COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY 397

(Henry Bosley Woolf, ed., 1977). 

That “something,” moreover, is limited by the rest of 

Exemption 8’s text. Although the language could be sharper, the

statute’s context and subsequent amendments make clear that it 

protects from disclosure only materials that are “contained in or 

related to examination . . . reports” that are both (1) prepared by 

an “agency responsible for the regulation . . . of financial 

institutions” and (2) compiled in the course of that agency’s 

regulation of a financial institution. To be sure, a wooden 

reading of Exemption 8’s text might lead the reader to believe 

that its scope depends only on whether the agency doing the 

examination is an agency “responsible for the regulation . . . of

financial institutions,” not on whether the organization that was 

the subject of the examination itself qualifies as a “financial 

institution.” That reading, however, is out of line with the 

original purpose of the statute, as well as the views of every 

relevant legislator and industry player. 

Congress enacted Exemption 8 to address the “concern[] 

that release of bank examination and operating reports could 

endanger the fiscal well-being of [] subject banks.” Consumers 

Union, 589 F.2d at 537. Reading the statute’s reference to 

“financial institutions” to limit only the agency whose records 

are exempt would depart from the statute’s original purpose. 

After all, such an interpretation would mean that an agency that 

regulates financial institutions—say, the Securities and 

Exchange Commission—could withhold any examination report 

it prepares, even if the report detailed the operations of an 

institution that is not even vaguely financial. This can hardly be 

what Congress intended when it sought to protect the “wellbeing of . . . banks.”

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Even the Commission’s own chair does not read the 

statute’s protections so broadly. Testifying in front of the House 

Financial Services Committee in 2010, she observed that 

“[t]hough . . . Exemption 8[] does provide important protections 

from disclosure for examination materials obtained from

‘financial institutions,’ that term is not defined in the law,” and 

it “might not clearly cover [certain] materials and protect them 

from disclosure” because “courts have not yet addressed whether 

certain entities the Commission has the authority and the 

responsibility to examine . . . are financial institutions for 

purposes of these FOIA protections.” Legislative Proposals to 

Address Concerns over the SEC’s New Confidentiality 

Provision, Hearing Before the House Committee on Financial 

Services, 2d Session, 111th Congress 10, 12 (2010) (emphasis 

added). 

Perhaps with that potential confusion in mind, Congress 

stepped in to clear things up in 2010 and, in the process, 

confirmed the chair’s—and our—reading of Exemption 8. 

Responding to concerns that a separate Dodd-Frank provision

muddied the Exemption 8 waters, Congress passed two 

amendments to the Exchange Act—and, by reference, to 

FOIA—that made apparent once and for all the exemption’s 

striking breadth, at least with respect to the Securities and 

Exchange Commission. First, Congress confirmed that “[f]or the 

purposes of [FOIA], the Commission is an agency responsible 

for the regulation or supervision of financial institutions.” 15 

U.S.C. § 78x(e)(1). And second, perhaps fearing that a future 

court might find that examinations of non-financial entities are

not covered by Exemption 8—if, for example, that court credited 

the Commission chair’sreading of the statute—Congress went a 

step further, clarifying that “[f]or the purposes of [FOIA] . . . any 

entity for which the Commission is responsible for regulating 

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[sic], supervising, or examining under [the Exchange Act] is a 

financial institution.” 15 U.S.C. § 78x(e)(2).

Read in a vacuum, the latter provision would make 

Exemption 8 entirely circular. Taking both amendments into 

account, the text would read: “[FOIA] does not apply to matters 

that are . . . contained in or related to examination . . . reports 

prepared by, on behalf of, or for the use of [the Commission,

which is] an agency responsible for the regulation or supervision 

of [entities the Commission is responsible for regulating or 

supervising].” But we think this interpretation would render 

Exemption 8 absurd; indeed, we can think of no “plausible 

reason why Congress might have intended [this] result[].” 

Landstar Express America, Inc. v. Federal Maritime 

Commission, 569 F.3d 493, 498 (D.C. Cir. 2009) (internal 

quotation marks omitted). Mindful that we are to avoid 

absurdities, we conclude that in passing the second half of the 

2010 fix, Congress purposefully reaffirmed the chair’s reading 

of Exemption 8’s application to the Commission. By clarifying

that “financial institution” means “any entity the Commission 

regulates,” Congress conditioned the exemption’s reach on 

whether the institution being examined is a “financial 

institution”—though, still, not on whether the particular records

would divulge financial data. This means that, in essence, one

should read “examination, operating, or condition reports” to 

mean “examination, operating, or condition reports related to 

financial institutions.” After all, with the first half of the 

amendment, Congress clarified that the Commission is an 

agency responsible for the regulation of financial institutions. 

Why would it have added a subsection to specify which 

organizations are financial institutions if nothing depended on 

it?

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An example should be helpful. To repurpose slightly a 

hypothetical one of us used at oral argument, suppose Congress 

gives the Commission jurisdiction over the National Football 

League and suppose further that the agency chooses to use its 

resources to examine the League’s response to the rising tide of 

player concussions. Even with these new responsibilities, by the 

plain language of FOIA and the newly amended Exchange Act, 

the Commission would still be an “agency responsible for the 

regulation or supervision of financial institutions,” and the NFL 

would have become a “financial institution” for Exemption 8 

purposes simply because the Commission regulates it.

Accordingly, any resulting Commission report on football 

concussions would qualify as an “examination . . . report 

prepared by an agency responsible for the regulation or 

supervision of financial institutions” and, crucially, as an 

examination report related to a financial institution. To put it 

another way, although no one would argue that the NFL is a 

financial institution in the traditional sense—billion-dollar 

television deals notwithstanding—and although a report on the 

League’s concussion protocol is unlikely to expose financial 

information, the Commission is indisputably an agency 

responsible for regulating financial institutions, and, by the 

terms of the 2010 amendment, the NFL would qualify as a 

financial institution. As a result of those amendments, then, any 

report arising out of the Commission’s examination of the NFL 

would be exempt from disclosure whether or not it risks outing 

someone’s financial details.

In sum, then, we hold that documents the Commission

collects while examining financial institutions—that is, while 

examining any organization the agency regulates—are exempt 

from disclosure. This is true no matter the records’substance so

long as they relate to a resulting report. The Commission 

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satisfies the “examination” requirement here. Whether it also 

checks the “report” box is the subject of the next section.

Before we address that issue, however, we think it 

important to emphasize that our broad reading of Exemption 8 

extends no further than the walls of the Securities and Exchange 

Commission. Because the 2010 amendments defined “financial 

institution” broadly only with respect to the Commission, this 

opinion has nothing to say about the ability of other financial 

agencies—say, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—to 

withhold specific records. 

Report

Exemption 8 allows the Commission to withhold records 

that relate to an examination “report.” The district court 

announced two conclusions on this issue. First, it held that 

“Exemption 8 does not require the defendant to identify a 

specific report to which the information relates.” Public 

Investors Arbitration Bar Association, 930 F. Supp. 2d at 72

(quoting Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Department of Treasury, 796 F. 

Supp. 2d 13, 37 (D.D.C. 2011)). Second, it found that, as a 

factual matter, “each potentially responsive document [in this 

case] does appear to relate to an examination report of some 

kind.” Id. at 71. We have little to go on in answering the 

doctrinal question of whether each withheld document must

relate to a specific examination report, though district courts in 

this circuit have held that it need not. See Judicial Watch, Inc. v. 

Department of Treasury, 796 F. Supp. 2d 13, 37 (D.D.C. 2011);

McKinley v. FDIC, 744 F. Supp. 2d 128, 144 (D.D.C. 2010). 

Fortunately, we can resolve this case without addressing that

issue, as the Commission has pointed to particular 

examinations—culminating in written products—to which the 

contested documents relate.

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PIABA’s argument to the contrary rests entirely on the 

Commission’s statement, contained in the sworn testimony of a 

senior staffer, that “each potentially responsive document relates 

to one of . . . four examinations . . . and/orrelates to one or more 

customer complaints.” Appellant’s Br. at 44; Declaration of 

Kristen Lever, JA 30, ¶ 14 (emphasis added). According to 

PIABA, the “and/or” means that the Commission left open the 

possibility that any one of the individual documents may relate 

only to a report arising out of a customer complaint and not to a

report stemming from an examination. Therefore, PIABA 

concludes, the declaration fails to assert that each withheld 

document relates to an examination, much less to an 

examination report. We disagree for two reasons.

To begin with, the declarant did not stop with her “and/or”

statement. Instead, she explained that all “documents potentially 

responsive to PIABA’s FOIA request relate to four examinations 

conducted by [the Commission]” and that “some of the 

potentially responsive documents may relate to particular 

complaints received by the SEC from arbitration participants.”

Lever Decl., JA 27, ¶ 7, 8. In other words, she clarified that all 

of the relevant documents relate to a Commission examination, 

and some of those documents may also implicate customer 

complaints.

But even if we were to credit the “and/or” statement over 

these contrary assertions, we would reject PIABA’s argument

because, as we have explained, an “examination report” is any 

report arising out of a “close inspection” or “careful inquiry.” 

WEBSTER’S NEW COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY 397 (Henry Bosley 

Woolf, ed., 1977). PIABA offers no reason to think the 

Commission was not conducting such an inspection or inquiry 

when responding to customer complaints. That the affidavit 

appears to separate examinations from responses to consumer 

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complaints hardly means that such responses are not also 

examinations. So even if a particular withheld document relates 

only to an inspection of a customer complaint, Exemption 8 

applies with full force.

III.

For the foregoing reasons, the Commission satisfied both of 

Exemption 8’s requirements and thus properly withheld all 

responsive documents. We affirm.

So ordered.

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BROWN, Circuit Judge, concurring:

We began in 1978 by interpreting Exemption 8’s 

categorically narrow exclusion broadly. Today, we dispense 

with that category. A plain reading of the text and our 

precedents seem to compel the Court’s conclusion. Yet the 

result is a disquieting one. As the district court observed—the 

2010 amendment “was a well-intentioned legislative fix 

which . . . resulted in its own . . . unintended consequences,” 

by “giv[ing] back with [] FOIA what [Congress] 

simultaneously intended to take away by repealing section 

929I.” Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association v. SEC, 

930 F. Supp. 2d 55, 69–70 (D.D.C. 2013). Exemption 8 is no 

longer merely a necessary hedge against the disclosure of 

critical financial records. Instead, like the mythical 

Ouroborus, the amendment may now swallow Congress’s

purported commitment to let “citizens know what their 

government is up to.” Nat’l Archives & Records Admin. v. 

Favish, 541 U.S. 157, 171–72 (2004). 

* * *

Our Exemption 8 cases are variations on a single theme: 

the exemption is “particularly broad” in scope, reflecting 

Congress’s “intentional[] and unambiguous[]” intent to craft 

an “all-inclusive” definition. Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. 

v. Heimann, 589 F.2d 531, 533 (D.C. Cir. 1978). Without 

looking to the legislative history to interpret plain statutory 

text, Totten v. Bombardier Corp., 380 F.3d 488, 494 (D.C. 

Cir. 2004), we may recognize that the universe of financial 

regulation has been radically transformed since Congress 

originally drafted Exemption 8’s broad language and since 

this Court first gave it effect. Initially, Exemption 8 was 

cabined by its context. Congress did not reference 

“examination” reports in a vacuum; the word is employed as 

part of an allied series protecting records contained in or 

related to “examination, operating, or condition reports.” 

USCA Case #13-5137 Document #1522260 Filed: 11/14/2014 Page 15 of 18
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5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(8). Such phrasing was intentional. See 

Platt v. Union Pac. R.R. Co., 99 U.S. 48, 59 (1878) (“[N]o 

words are to be treated as surplusage or as repetition.”) (citing 

state law canons of statutory construction). Congress was 

drafting under the principal assumption that it was regulating 

a world largely consisting of banks and like financial 

institutions, and Congress was primarily addressing the 

palpable “concern[] that release of bank examination and 

operating reports could endanger the fiscal well-being of [] 

subject banks.” Consumers Union, 589 F.2d at 537. 

Disregarding its modestly questionable syntax, the original 

text of Exemption 8 makes clear that Congress’s limitation 

“of financial institutions” modifies both the “agency 

responsible for the regulation” and materials “contained in or 

related to examination, operating, or condition reports.” 5 

U.S.C. § 552(b)(8). Cf. NORMAN J. SINGER & SHAMBIE 

SINGER, STATUTES AND STATUTORY CONSTRUCTION § 47:33 

(7th ed. 2014) (“[W]here the sense of an entire act requires 

that a qualifying word or phrase apply to several preceding . . 

. sections, the qualifying word or phrase is not restricted to its 

immediate antecedent.”). And this emphasis on protecting 

fundamentally financially-related materials serves as the 

central tenet rationalizing Exemption 8’s existence.

Admittedly, our case law has derived a secondary 

purpose behind Exemption 8’s promulgation, not moored 

directly to the statutory text but of some undeniable, though 

not equal, import: “safeguard[ing] the relationship between 

the banks and their supervising agencies.” Consumers Union, 

589 F.2d at 534. See also Lever Decl. at ¶ 15 (“OCIE 

depends on receiving cooperation to effectively and 

efficiently conduct the . . . examinations that are at issue here. 

In addition, OCIE relies on this cooperation to fulfill its 

oversight responsibilities generally, which affects the SEC’s 

mission to effectively regulate the securities markets.”). Yet, 

USCA Case #13-5137 Document #1522260 Filed: 11/14/2014 Page 16 of 18
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though this secondary purpose may at times carry significant 

weight, when standing alone, it ought not thwart FOIA’s 

broad overarching rule favoring disclosure, in all instances 

where a vaguely cooperative interest in the regulation of 

financial institutions is implicated. See generally Dep’t of Air 

Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. 352, 353 (1976) (“The limited 

statutory exemptions do not obscure the basic policy that 

disclosure, not secrecy, is the dominant legislative objective 

of the FOIA.”). 

Our case law has oft repeated the mantra of Exemption 

8’s “all-inclusive” scope without fully considering the 

changed universe in which financial institutions operate. Cf., 

e.g., Pub. Citizen v. Farm Credit Admin., 938 F.2d 290, 291 

(D.C. Cir. 1991); Gregory v. FDIC, 631 F.2d 896 (D.C. Cir. 

1980). Our precedents serve to bolster and inform our

conclusion—correct in light of the 2010 amendment—that 

even documents of potentially dubious relation to core 

“financial” data (i.e., arbitration program oversight records) 

necessarily fall within Exemption 8’s ambit. 

Yet, to the extent our case law fosters today’s result, it 

bears questioning the wisdom of the course our precedents 

plot. The financial world has changed since the genesis of our 

Exemption 8 case law. So has the world in which our 

financial system operates. Financial institutions and their 

regulators now frequently operate under a haze of public 

distrust fueled by repeated regulatory failures and massive, 

opaque, and unaccountable bailouts. The public now has 

good reason to doubt the rigor of our financial systems’ 

reliability and oversight.

The ramifications of Exemption 8’s all-encompassing

secrecy therefore reach far beyond PIABA’s (legitimate) 

concern for the adequacy and fairness of FINRA’s regime of 

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arbitration. It bodes ill for rebuilding civic trust that 

Exemption 8 could be employed to permanently shroud both 

the possible reckless conduct by regulated financial 

institutions and the particulars of sweeping agency intrusions 

into the sphere of the financial marketplace. See, e.g.,

Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Dep’t of Treasury, 796 F. Supp. 

2d 13, 37–38 (D.D.C. 2011) (finding many documents 

relating to the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, and 

related agency investments, protected from disclosure by, 

among other things, Exemption 8).

“The fabric of [the] American empire ought to rest on the 

solid basis of the consent of the people.” THE FEDERALIST 

NO. 22 (Alexander Hamilton). That at times delicate weave 

risks coming undone where vague principles of regulatory 

cooperation are allowed to inevitably trump the public’s 

interest in transparency. 

Congress should revisit this ill-conceived amendment and 

make sure an apparent miscue does not morph into a serious 

misadventure.

USCA Case #13-5137 Document #1522260 Filed: 11/14/2014 Page 18 of 18