When asked about the pace of the SEC's rule-making — which many industry groups have criticized for the volume and complexity of proposals introduced — Peirce said, "it's very problematic."
"It is understandable that the chairman of the agency has a lot of ambitions about what kinds of things should change and how those changes should happen," she said. "But if you want to do things right in a regulatory agency like ours, I really think you have to be gradual in how you do things, and you have to really be deliberate and get a lot of input."
While there are valuable comment letters coming in for each proposal, "I'm getting deprived of having the full value of the input that I need" due to a condensed time frame, Peirce said.
If given more time, she said, the SEC would likely receive more substantive comment letters and data to consider for each proposal.
Roundtables are "a very undervalued tool," she added, that the SEC could use "to work through identifying where the real problems are, and then figuring out what reasonable solutions to those problems would be. But again, those take time, and so we're not doing them."
"I would like to spend more time on each of these individual rule-makings," Peirce said. "But when you've got them coming fast and furious, you've just got to make decisions about how you allocate your time as well."