Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot

Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot is a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) attorney. She worked on the Bernard Madoff investigation in 2004, as the Lead Investigator for the SEC on the case. She discovered key elements of the Madoff Ponzi scheme and reported them to her superiors. She was moved off the case prior to being able to complete the investigation.

Education Genevievette E. Walker graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Huntington, New York, received her B.A. from Georgetown University, and attended the Catholic University of America (J.D., 1999).

American Stock Exchange Walker-Lightfoot worked at the American Stock Exchange from 1999–2001 as a staff lawyer.

Madoff investment scandal Walker-Lightfoot worked at the SEC from 2001–06. While a lawyer in the SEC's Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations, she was tasked in 2003–04 with conducting the SEC’s investigation into a complaint about the activities of now-convicted Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff and his firm.

Walker-Lightfoot sent emails to her supervisor saying information provided by Madoff during her review didn't add up, and sent up a set of questions to ask Madoff's firm, according to a report in The Washington Post. It is alleged that several of the questions alleged to have been raised directly challenged Madoff activities that turned out to be elements of his massive fraud, the newspaper said, however the SEC Inspector General’s report on the Madoff scandal notes that she was “the only person involved in the [SEC’s] Madoff examination to refuse to testify” to the OIG and it was therefore “difficult to assess her credibility” in making such claims. Madoff was sentenced to a prison term of 150 years on June 29, 2009, after he pleaded guilty to a decades-long fraud that U.S. prosecutors said drew in as much as $65 billion.

Walker-Lightfoot left the SEC in January 2006, after having received a judgment in her favor against the SEC in a hostile work environment case. Walker-Lightfoot did not experience a break in Federal service, as she immediately went to work at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where she worked as a specialist in risk management and large financial institutions

Richards ultimately testified that her department failed to find Madoff due to having to "match available staff resources to the most pressing needs". She restated the same cause for missing the Madoff Ponzi scheme June 17, 2009, in a speech at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association's Compliance and Legal Division St. Louis Regional Seminar.

On July 9, six days after the Washington Post article concerning Walker-Lightfoot's involvement in the Madoff investigation was published, The Post announced that Richards would resign from the SEC in order to "take on new challenges."