The SEC's Congress-mandated report providing support for its independent chairman rule doesn't have a whole lot of new information, writes the Wall Street Journal.

That's because the people responsible for the report were pretty much the same people in the SEC's Investment Management division who wrote the original rule, the WSJ reported people familiar with the matter as saying.

The report authors were unable to provide the hard evidence that Congress was looking for because, the WSJ writes, SEC economists were unable to provide firm conclusions about whether funds with independent chairmen perform better, have better compliance or lower expenses than non-independently chaired funds.

And like the original ruling, where SEC Chairman William Donaldson and two Democratic Commissioners Harvey Goldschmid and Roel Campos voted "yay", the three joined forces again to sign off on the report, according to the WSJ. Republican Commissioners Cynthia Glassman and Paul Atkins wrote objections to the report on the grounds that the report authors did not do what Congress asked, writes the WSJ.

The objections will be included in the report, along with a letter from Donaldson noting the dissenting opinions.  

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