Those laws often prohibit violators from taking part in certain businesses or receiving privileges granted to law-abiding companies. But those rules are routinely waived as part of settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other government agencies.

To some, such waivers are obviously necessary. “If you don’t get a waiver as part of a settlement,” one former S.E.C. official told me, “it is hard to imagine getting a settlement.”

The S.E.C. has not appeared to be eager to publicize the waivers. They are posted on the S.E.C. website, but they are not announced at the same time as the settlements and are not included in the court documents describing the settlements. As a result, news articles focus on the penalty being paid, not the penalties the law might have required absent the waivers.

Are waiver requests ever refused? I could find no record of such a refusal on the S.E.C. website. Waiver discussions are apparently conducted privately and informally and then put on paper only when the matter is wrapped up. If the S.E.C. will not grant the waiver, it is never formally requested and thus stays off the public record.

A typical example came on March 12, when Jefferies, a brokerage firm, accepted an S.E.C. censure and fine for failing to supervise Jesse C. Litvak, a former managing director who had been convicted days earlier of defrauding the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. At the same time, the firm signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department stemming from the same incidents. It paid $25 million in penalties.

Under the law — including a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law adopted in 2010 — Jefferies would have automatically been barred from underwriting private offerings of securities under S.E.C. regulations that allow companies to issue securities without making disclosures that would otherwise be required.

Image Kara Stein objected to a waiver for Royal Bank of Scotland. Credit... Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Photo, via Associated Press

On that same day, March 12, a lawyer for Jefferies sent a letter to the commission asking for waivers. Failing to grant them, the lawyer said, would “have an adverse effect on third parties.” And who were those innocent third parties? They were companies “that have retained, or may retain in the future,” Jefferies to underwrite such deals.