The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s internal regulator has determined that the CFTC may have been in violation of a federal law that requires the Commission to maintain a research program after suspending outside research from being published.

The claim comes from the CFTC’s reaction to a complaint filed by CME Group back in December 2012. According to CME Group, the Commission was illegally allowing outside researchers access to proprietary market data.

In its claim, CME Group pointed to a paper published by former CFTC chief economist Andrei Kirilenko and two outside researchers in regards to High Frequency Trading. According to CME Group, this and other papers published by the CFTC used non-public information to reach conclusions.

In response to this complaint, the CFTC suspended the publication of outside research and had its inspector general’s office look into whether or not the Commission had in fact broken any laws while allowing outside researchers access to sensitive market data.

Interestingly, while the inspector general’s office found CME Group’s claims to be unsubstantiated, saying that the CFTC broke no laws through its outside research program, it claimed that the CFTC may have very well violated a law by suspending the publication of outside research.

Furthermore, the inspector general went on to criticize the CFTC’s handling of data, saying that the Commission has been taking entirely too long to review academic papers before being published, to the point that it may be violating free speech rights.

The CFTC issued a strongly worded letter along with the report last week, disagreeing with the inspector general’s office’s findings, going as far as to deny that the research program is even shut down. The CFTC said that full time economists still have access to data. The commission also stated that it maintains a research and information program through news releases, staff advisories, and publicly aggregated data.