General Electric Agrees to Pay $200 Million Penalty for Disclosure Violations

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that General Electric Co. (GE) has agreed to pay a $200 million penalty to settle charges for disclosure failures in its power and insurance businesses. In 2017 and 2018, GE’s stock price fell almost 75% as challenges in its power and insurance businesses were disclosed to the public. According to the SEC’s order, GE misled investors by describing its GE Power profits without explaining that one-quarter of profits in 2016 and nearly half in the first three quarters of 2017 stemmed from reductions in its prior cost estimates. The order also finds that GE failed to tell investors that its reported increase in current industrial cash collections was coming at the expense of cash in future years and came primarily from internal receivable sales between GE Power and GE’s financial services business, GE Capital.