SEC’s Investor Education Fund Is Losing Most of Its Directors

The chairman and most of the board of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investor education foundation plan to resign, delaying efforts to teach smart investment practices.

“We are as unhappy and frustrated as anyone with the management of the Investor Education Foundation, which seems to have delayed the foundation’s progress in getting off the ground,” the SEC said in a statement Wednesday.

The nonprofit Investor Education Foundation was created by a $52.5-million payout under the SEC’s 2003 settlement with 10 Wall Street investment banks over biased stock research. The group is overseen by New York federal Judge William Pauley III, who approved the education plan and must sign off on the resignations.

Board Chairman Charles Ellis, the founder of business strategy consulting firm Greenwich Associates, declined to comment. He was named a year ago to head the fund, which hasn’t distributed any money.

Ellis’ departure, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, follows the resignation in January of the group’s executive director, George Daly.