My fellow Wharton grad Marty Lipton, the scion of venerable M&A law firm Wachtell Lipton and inventor of the poison pill, is adding to the drumbeat of folks suggesting that quarterly reporting by public companies might be bad. Why? Because it forces companies to focus...
Sometimes good things happen to good people. In this case folks filing public offerings and other registrations with the SEC will see a reduction in filing fees. The agency made the announcement yesterday. As of October 2015, the start of the SEC's fiscal year, the...
Despite the SEC's attempt to force the court to reconsider, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit this week reaffirmed its decision from last year that parts of the SEC's required disclosure by public companies of their involvement with "conflict minerals" is...
Audit Analytics has done a fascinating review of the Securities and Exchange Commission's penchant for issuing comment letters after reviewing public companies' quarterly and annual filings on Forms 10-K and 10-Q (like the one Apple got above). The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 mandated the SEC...
A sharply divided Securities and Exchange Commission approved rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act requiring most companies to disclose the ratio of their CEO's pay to their average median employee salaries. The two Republican commissioners strongly opposed the rules on various grounds. A controversial part...
The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was signed by the President on July 21, 2010. Quite a different world then. Some, like its namesakes (pictured above), think it has made our banking and economic system safer and has been successfully implemented by...
Last week the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued an "investor bulletin" about its amendments to Regulation A made under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act of 2012. The introduction to the bulletin makes clear the changes were made "to enhance the ability of...
On the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, William Galvin, the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (pictured above), filed a petition in Washington DC against the SEC requesting that the court stop the implementation and enforcement of the SEC's changes to Regulation A. They are...
Kudos to the House Financial Services Committee. This week they unanimously (read: strong bipartisan support) passed a bill allowing all SEC reporting companies to incorporate by reference into registration statements on Form S-1 filings made after the registration goes effective. This will dramatically reduce small...
The SEC released proposed rules required by the Dodd-Frank Act a few weeks ago. The proposal, if adopted, would require public companies to compare senior executives' compensation with the actual performance of the company, measured by a shareholder return metric. "Emerging growth companies" (EGCs) will...