“The Securities and Exchange Commission has kept the credit rating industry — whose dominant members, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, played a notoriously key role in the financial crisis — in legal limbo for four years. And the industry’s just fine with that.

“Apparently so are members of Congress, who have failed to press the SEC to hold credit agencies accountable, as law requires, for the ratings they issue on securities backed by mortgages or other assets.

“The law, part of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 that Congress passed in response to the crisis, was intended to fix a main cause of the meltdown: high but highly inaccurate credit ratings that firms, particularly S&P and Moody’s, gave to the likes of investment bank Lehman Brothers before it failed, insurance giant AIG before it nearly failed and billions of dollars of subprime mortgage securities that proved worthless.”

“‘I’m disappointed,’ says Barney Frank, the now retired congressmen from Massachusetts who, as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, helped craft the act that bears his name.

So are investors, who say the SEC’s inaction leaves the economy vulnerable. They worry an ongoing lack of accountability permits credit agencies to return to bad habits.

“‘(A) higher standard of accountability … would make rating agencies more diligent about the ratings process and, ultimately, more accountable for sloppy performance,” says Ann Yerger, head of the Council of Institutional Investors, a shareholder advocacy group representing pension funds, employee benefit funds, endowments and foundations with combined assets of more than $3 trillion.

“Dennis M. Kelleher, CEO of Better Markets, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group pushing to make financial markets fairer and more transparent, agrees: “Credit rating agencies are critical and must be held liable for their failures. The SEC has failed the American people.”

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