President Donald Trump’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair, Wall Street’s top cop, just sold his financial services firm for more than $25 million — and is set to receive a massive tax break on the proceeds, according to new federal ethics disclosures obtained by the Lever.
Paul Atkins, who spent years helping Wall Street actors fend off federal regulators, has refused to disclose who’s behind his tax-free payout or whether his benefactors have business before the agency he now runs, even after lawmakers suggested the deal resembled a “pre-bribe.”
Atkins, a former SEC commissioner and corporate lawyer who has established himself in recent years as a trusted Wall Street consultant, assumed the top role at the SEC in April. He is now the wealthiest SEC chair in history, with an estimated net worth of $327 million between him and his spouse.
Atkins is seen as an ardent advocate of the cryptocurrency industry and friend to Wall Street, and news of his pick for the position was received by corporate America as an early sign of the second Trump administration’s full-throated embrace of crypto and financiers.
Atkins’s first ethics filings in March revealed the extent of his investments in Wall Street: up until his nomination, he served on the advisory board of Securitize Inc., a crypto firm that has partnered with Wall Street investment giant BlackRock. He also advised fintech companies and held positions with various crypto advocacy groups, such as serving as cochair of the Token Alliance, which publicly criticized SEC regulation.
But the crown jewel of his business interests is Patomak Global Partners, the financial services firm that he founded in 2009. Atkins’s firm advised Wall Street on how to handle SEC compliance, boasting clients including Goldman Sachs and Fidelity, as well as lobbying shops like the US Chamber of Commerce.
Jeff Hauser, the executive director of Washington conflicts-of-interest watchdog the Revolving Door Project, described Atkins’s company as “a business dedicated to a vision of the world in which corporate elites hire experienced Washington wranglers to influence politics in the moment and buy potentially priceless access in the future.”
The company has also provided a windfall for Atkins. This month, Atkins sold his ownership stake in Patomak for between $25 million and $50 million to an undisclosed buyer or buyers. Because of a special loophole in the tax code for private citizens entering public service, Atkins will be eligible for a huge tax break on the sale of Patomak, among several other divestitures.
In May, after making it known that he planned to sell his stake in Patomak, Atkins received approval for the tax break, allowing him to indefinitely defer capital gains tax on any such divestments, although it is difficult to estimate the exact value of the arrangement.
Atkins did not return a request for comment from the Lever about the sale of his firm, nor did the SEC. But during his March 2025 Senate confirmation hearing, lawmakers were already asking about who was lining up as Patomak’s potential buyer.
“Will you disclose who the buyers are and how much they pay,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asked him during her inquiry, “so that we can make certain that these are people who are not just buying access to the future chair of the SEC?”
Atkins appeared reluctant to directly answer Warren’s question, saying that he had “abided by the Office of Government Ethics process” in disclosing information about his divestiture.
“So you’re not going to tell us who you sell it to and how much money you get, to people who will have business before the SEC?” she pressed. “You know, some people may call that a pre-bribe.”
Atkins is no stranger to the agency he now leads. After building a career in corporate compliance law, Atkins served as an SEC commissioner under President George W. Bush from 2002 to August 2008, where he was charged with overseeing companies operating on the stock market to ensure compliance with laws designed to stabilize the market and protect investors’ money.
In his March Senate hearing, Warren highlighted that during his earlier SEC tenure, Atkins approved weaker capital requirements for financial giants like Lehman Brothers shortly before they went under, helping to set the stage for the 2008 financial crisis. (Atkins would go on to call the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, which lawmakers passed in 2010 to help prevent future meltdowns, a “calamity.”)
Following his SEC stint, Atkins founded Patomak Global Partners, a consulting firm that “advises clients on complex and cutting-edge strategy and risk management challenges.” The firm claims to assist financial firms, including banks, mortgage servicers, and fintechs, on compliance programs and “prepares clients for examinations by U.S. banking regulators” such as the SEC.
Atkins now takes charge of the SEC, the “prime spot to deliver for all those clients who have been paying you millions of dollars for years,” Warren told Atkins at his confirmation hearing.
“I am sure that Atkins’s mystery counterparty is quite confident that Atkins will continue to pursue the same interests at the SEC as he advanced at Patomak,” said Hauser at the Revolving Door Project.
Atkins’s leadership comes at a time when oversight of Wall Street firms is being systematically dismantled by the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the SEC hemorrhaged workers via voluntary buyouts.
Other regulatory agencies have taken similar hits. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse to enforce federal financial consumer laws, has been rendered effectively toothless by mass layoffs and major rule reversals.
The Federal Trade Commission, the country’s top antitrust regulator, has been stripped of its Democratic commissioners, halted a string of antitrust cases, and touted its plans to expeditiously approve mergers.
And the Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, recently moved to dismiss major litigations against corporations and has been slowly purging its antitrust and corporate crimes team, firing some of its key staff as recently as Monday.
“First and foremost, it is a new day at the SEC,” Atkins said during June 3 testimony in a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government.
Atkins is hardly the first federal official to receive a tax break upon selling off conflicts of interest. The practice dates back to the 1990s, when lawmakers inserted a provision in the tax code as an incentive for public officials entering office from the private sector. Famously, the loophole granted Henry Paulson, then the Goldman Sachs CEO, a tax reprieve on his $500 million divestiture from his financial holdings when he took office as Bush’s Treasury Secretary in 2006.
Without the loophole, Paulson would have had to pay capital gains tax on the sale, at a rate between 15 and 39 percent. But the loophole allowed him to theoretically defer the tax indefinitely by putting the sale proceeds in diversified investment funds. Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer who oversaw Paulson at the time, told the Lever last year that he had no idea if Paulson ever paid the tax.
Trump’s new Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, this year received a similar deal when he agreed to sell $484 million of shares in his own financial services company, in the process obtaining a likely multimillion-dollar tax break.
Atkins received certificates of divestiture — the document that allows him to claim the tax break — for sales of several other conflicts of interest, worth collectively at least $3 million. Those divestitures included his shares in the crypto company Securitize and his stake in Off the Chain, a venture capital firm that invests in blockchain companies. Each of these ownership stakes was worth at least $1 million, per ethics disclosures.
On July 1, Atkins sold his ownership interest in Patomak Global Partners as well as his shares in an asset management firm, ending his formal role with the company he founded. “I suspect the purchaser . . . knows that the Patomak staffers and clients of the present and future will be well cared for by Paul Atkins, a man not known for forgetting his friends and allies,” said Hauser.
The sale came not long after Patomak announced a new board, made up of former regulatory officials, including former SEC chair Richard Breeden and former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman Randal Quarles.
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