April 2015

I’ve done my share of griping about the SEC, but credit needs to be given where credit is due. And credit is due to the SEC for adopting a new, improved version of Regulation A that has become known as “Reg A+”. (OK, we can gripe about how long it took the SEC to adopt the final rule, but let’s be gracious and remember that justice delayed isn’t necessarily justice denied.)

Reg A has been around forever, but has been used very infrequently. Like many other long-time SEC practitioners, I’ve never done a Reg A deal. There are many reasons for this, but the big one is that Reg A limited the maximum amount of an offering to $5 million – hardly enough to justify the costs involved (which included compliance with Blue Sky laws). Then Reg D came along, as well as the amendment of Rule 144 reducing the amount of time that an investor had to hold “restricted securities,” and the rest is history.

The JOBS Act called for the SEC to review and update Reg A, and they’ve done an A+ job – all puns intended. Here are some key provisions of Reg A+
Continue Reading A high mark (would you believe an A+?) for the SEC

On Sunday, April 12, the Business section of the New York Times led with an article by Gretchen Morgenson taking the SEC to task for not having adopted rules requiring disclosure of CEO pay ratios. This follows similar complaints by members of Congress, most recently in the form of a March letter by 58 Democratic congressmen to Chair White. And going further back – specifically, to Chair White’s Senate confirmation hearing in March 2013 – Senator Warren told Chair-Designate White that SEC action on this rule “should be near the top of your list.”

Really?

I’ve given this a great deal of thought since Congress mandated pay ratio disclosure in the Dodd-Frank Act, and I’ve yet to figure out why – aside from political considerations – so many people think this disclosure is so important or what it will achieve. In fact, when I coordinated a comment letter on the rule proposal as Chair of the Securities Law Committee of the Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals, I told a number of people that it was the hardest comment letter I’d ever worked on, and I believe that was the case because it was hard to comment on a proposal that struck and continues to strike me as ill-advised and unnecessary in its entirety.

Ms. Morgenson’s article proves my point. It provides pay ratio data for a number of companies, as determined by a Washington think tank. But at the end of the article, all the data demonstrate is that the CEOs of the companies in question make a ton of money. The ratios don’t tell us anything more than that; Disney had the highest ratio, but does anyone need a ratio to know that its CEO makes lots of money? Ditto Oracle, Starbucks and the others – in all cases, the ratio is far less informative than the dollar amounts, which of course are and have for many years been disclosable.

The ratios might – but only might – be more meaningful if we knew what the underlying facts are; for example, what is the mix of US to non-US employees? To what extent are the employees part-time or seasonal? But of course the article doesn’t reveal this information, and neither would the proposed SEC rules. And the SEC Staff has indicated the final rules are not likely to allow companies to exclude non-US, part-time or seasonal employees. In other words, we won’t be able to distinguish between two companies with the same pay ratios regardless of the fact that one may have vast numbers of employees in the third world while the other’s employees are located in major industrialized countries.Continue Reading CEO pay ratios: ineffective disclosure on steroids

I’m a governance nerd. I really believe that corporate governance is important, that it makes a difference, and that there is such a thing as good governance – though I don’t believe that one size fits all.

So it troubles me that in governance, as in life, virtue is usually not its own reward. In