On September 26, 2008, Cox ended the 2004 program for voluntary regulation of investment bank holding companies, begun under SEC Chairman William Donaldson and then-Director of Market Regulation (later SEC Commissioner) Annette Nazareth. The program "was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily," Cox said. A critical report by the SEC inspector general that evaluated the program in light of the Bear Stearns near-failure in March 2008 found that while "Bear Stearns was compliant with the capital and liquidity requirements" at the time of its acquisition, "its collapse raises serious questions about the adequacy of these requirements." However, according to the Inspector General, his report "did not include a determination of the cause of Bear Stearns' collapse" or determine "whether any of these issues directly contributed to Bear Stearns' collapse." On that subject, the report stated, "we have no evidence linking these significant deficiencies with the cause of Bear Stearns' collapse." Cox criticized the oversight program on the ground that because of its voluntary nature and the SEC's limited statutory authority, the agency could not force changes in the hundreds of unregulated subsidiaries of large investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns as bank regulators could do with bank holding companies. In testimony before Congress on several occasions in 2008, he asked for statutory authority to regulate investment bank holding companies.