Mary L. Schapiro, who appears this week at her confirmation hearing on her selection to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, has been accused in two lawsuits of making misleading statements to relentlessly complete a merger of two regulatory agencies after which she garnered a 57 percent raise in pay.

The New York Times reports that, “the merger involved the regulatory units of the New York Stock Exchange and the NASD two years ago. Ms. Schapiro was then head of the NASD, and she spent months traveling to persuade its 5,100 members to support it. The merger created a new self-regulatory organization, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra, where Ms. Shapiro is the chief executive. The Securities and Exchange Commission relies on Finra to police Wall Street.”

Among the misstatements that she is accused of telling is that the Internal Revenue Service had banned the NASD from paying each member more than $35,000 as part of the merger deal. Even though the NASD proxy statement issued while the deal was pending claimed that the I.R.S. would not allow the organization to give more compensation to members, the I.R.S. did not actually issue a ruling on the matter until March 2007, a long time after the deal closed and three months after the members voted to approve it.

Attorneys representing Mary L Schapiro, Finra and other senior executives have battled vigorously to keep the I.R.S. ruling - and court references to details of that ruling - under seal. A federal judge in New York denied a request last January to the New York Times to unseal the ruling and other documents in the case.

Ms. Schapiro’s lawyer has denied the lawsuit’s allegations and, in a recent interview, claimed that the second suit, filed shortly after her selection, is an opportunistic attempt to push the defendants to settle. The first, dismissed by a federal district judge in New York City, is on appeal.

According to the NY Times, at the S.E.C., Ms. Schapiro would be leading a government regulator that has been battered by setbacks, including its failure to uncover the apparent long-running fraud at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. A recent report by the S.E.C.’s inspector general said the agency had failed to adequately police the markets and regulate Wall Street’s largest investment banks. Congressional critics have said the S.E.C.’s shortcomings contributed to the financial crisis.

The strongest supporters of the merger that created Finra were the more than 200 firms, which were members of both the NASD and the New York Stock Exchange. The merger dramatically lowered their regulatory expenses, however many of the smaller members were worried about what benefits they might receive from it.

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