Madoff Madness: A Textual Analysis of the SEC's response to the Madoff Ponzi Scheme

On December 11, 2008, the financial world was in a panic as the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the arrest of Bernard L. Madoff of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC, for orchestrating a $65 billion Ponzi scheme. An investigation took place into Madoff's practices, and as a result, it was revealed the SEC failed to catch Madoff years earlier as a result of its business practices. After this became known, the SEC faced reputational harm. This qualitative analysis seeks to discover through identification and analysis of themes and sub-themes of response strategies, the extent to which the SEC applied Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) in its crisis response, in order to examine SCCT's merit as a theory in government crisis communication research. This study also offers additional response strategies imposed by the SEC to suggest further expansion of SCCT in a government context.