Credit rating agencies were the drivers of the financial crisis. Their AAA stamps of approval encouraged investors to purchase massive quantities of subprime mortgage-backed securities. As we now know, these assurances of complete safety led investors right into a toxic meltdown.

This was entirely foreseeable: Rating agencies get paid to rate securities by the companies who issue them. This places an inherent conflict of interest at the heart of their business model: If they make it easier for a client to sell questionable securities by rating them highly, then that client will return with future business. Examples of rating inflation abound, and even the Justice Department, which has shown little willingness to go to trial over financial fraud, has an active $5 billion lawsuit against Standard and Poor’s for granting AAA ratings to securities the company knew was junk.

But despite bipartisan efforts in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to overhaul the flawed rating agency compensation model, it remains in place four years later. This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) tried to attack the conflict of interest issue once again, with new reporting requirements and a broad promise of enforcement. But to believe that the SEC will actually police rating inflation, you would have to ignore all of its recent history.

Senators Al Franken and Roger Wicker passed an amendment into Dodd-Frank in 2010, with 64 votes, where the SEC would randomly assign securities to nationally accredited rating agencies, and increased or decreased their workload annually based on performance. The more accurate the ratings, the more business the SEC would give the rating agency.

However, the Franken-Wicker amendment got watered down in the final version of Dodd-Frank. Instead, the SEC was required only to issue a study about rating-agency conflict of interest, and then implement rules that either used the random assignment model, or some other solution deemed more “feasible.”