Kathryn B. McGrath

KATHRYN B. McGRATH - 2015

Kathie McGrath served with distinction in almost every regulatory area of the SEC, advising, providing ideas and leadership and mentoring a generation of SEC staffers.

She joined the staff in 1970 as an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel and then served as legal counsel to Commissioner Philip Loomis, Chairman Ray Garrett and Chairman Rod Hills. After working on rulemaking in Corporation Finance, she returned to the OGC as Assistant and then Associate General Counsel, later moving to the Division of Market Regulation to head the Office of Self-Regulatory Oversight.

Kathie left the SEC in 1979 to join Ray Garrett in private practice. Chairman John Shad brought her back to the SEC in 1983 as Director of the Division of Investment Management, a job she held for the next seven years.

Kathie’s tenure as Director of Investment Management coincided with a period of unprecedented growth in the investment management sector. Mutual funds took off in popularity among average Americans looking to save and invest for college, retirement and other life goals. Fund assets under management grew from $778 billion in 1983 to $6.2 trillion in 1990, while the number of SEC-registered funds increased by 75% and registered investment advisers grew in number by more than 150%.

Under Kathie’s leadership, the Division completed an extraordinary overhaul of its regulatory program, making funds and advisory services easier for average investors to understand and compare, and updating and streamlining reporting and recordkeeping requirements for funds and advisers. Today, Kathie is Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the ICMA Retirement Corporation, a non-profit dedicated to supporting state and local governments in managing their retirement accounts.

Looking back on her career at the SEC, Kathie says: “What a terrific place to work and, best of all, it still is! I was lucky to have a whole series of incredibly talented and dedicated bosses, starting with Jake Stillman, Paul Gonson and Dave Ferber, and then Phil Loomis, Ray Garrett, Rod Hills, Dick Rowe, Harvey Pitt, Andy Klein, John Shad, David Ruder and Richard Breeden, to name a few. Even more amazing was the huge number of extremely smart, hard-working and thoroughly decent staffers, across the SEC, that I was privileged to work with and learn from every single day I was there. It was extraordinary to find so much talent in one government agency, and a small agency at that.” A generation of SEC staff who were privileged to work for and with Kathie would echo this view. She is an incredibly talented and dedicated boss.