In September 2009, as chief of staff to Senator Ted Kaufman, I sat in on a meeting with the then-senator and Lanny Breuer, who led the criminal division of the Justice Department at the time. Why, Senator Kaufman wanted to know, had the Justice Department not prosecuted financial institutions and the individuals who run them for criminal behavior? Breuer said he was “dependent on the pipeline” to bring forward cases, and added that bank regulators so far had provided no criminal referrals related to the financial crisis.

A year later, Breuer told us he still “need[ed] people with deep substantive knowledge” to bring forward cases, and in recent U.S. Senate hearings, it was clear that little has changed. Bank regulators, having failed to accumulate evidence of wrongdoing in the financial industry, punted questions about criminal behavior to the Justice Department. At the same time, Justice Department leaders, when explaining why they didn’t indict large banks, hid behind bank regulators’ concerns about “collateral consequences” to the financial industry and economy.

One thing has changed, however, and it’s encouraging. What’s different now is that, unlike 2009, when Senator Kaufman, who served on the Judiciary Committee and could warn only about the Justice Department’s failure to investigate Wall Street, the Senate Banking Committee is finally overseeing and not overlooking the abysmal record of bank regulators. Even better, newcomer Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge.

At Warren’s first Banking Committee hearing in February, she asked a panel of bank regulators: “When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial?”

"We do not have to bring people to trial," Thomas Curry, head of the primary bank regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of "consent orders," or settlements.