The week of June 24, 2024 may be remembered as one of the worst in recent memory for the SEC, which – along with the “administrative state” generally – was beaten up by some very significant decisions handed down by the U.S. federal courts.
Securities Fraud Claims Seeking Civil Penalties Must Be Brought in Federal
Although Dodd-Frank was enacted in 2010, the rule needed to implement one of its provisions – the requirement to disclose hedging policies – only recently took effect. In fact, for calendar-year companies, 2020 will be the first year in which the proxy statement will have
As we approach the end of 2018, it’s only natural to look back on some of the year’s events – and some non-events. For my money, one of the most significant non-events was the inauguration of CEO pay ratio disclosure, one of the evil spawn of Dodd-Frank.
In the interest of brevity, I’ll skip the background of the disclosure requirement, except to say that it seemed intended to shame CEOs – or, more accurately, their boards – into at least slowing the rate of growth in CEO pay. Some idealists may have actually thought that it would lead to reductions in CEO pay. Poor things; they failed to realize not only that all legislative and regulatory attempts to reduce CEO pay have failed, but also that such attempts have in every single instance been followed by increases in CEO pay.
So the 2018 proxy season, and with it pay ratio disclosures, came and went. Sure, there were media outcries about some of the ratios, but they failed to generate any traction. Companies may have incurred significant monetary and other costs to develop the data needed to prepare the disclosures, but their concerns about peasants storming the corporate gates with torches and pitchforks proved needless. Few, if any, investors – and certainly no mainstream investors – seemed to care about the pay ratios. Employees making less than the “median” employee didn’t rise up in anger. Even the proxy advisory firms seemed to yawn in unison.
So that’s that. Or so you’d think.Continue Reading To pay ratio advocates, nothing succeeds like excess
Possibly lost in the heat of summer and the false narrative that the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act had somehow repealed the Dodd-Frank Act, the recent Act, which was signed into law on May 24th, has a few provisions impacting the
Earlier this month, the Federal Reserve proposed changes to its guidance on corporate governance for banking organizations. The proposals suggest a new approach to corporate governance that could extend beyond the banking industry; among other things, they suggest that boards should spend more time on more important matters, such as strategy and risk tolerance, than on compliance box-ticking. However, taken as a whole, the proposals strike me as being something of a mixed bag. And some of the positive aspects of the proposals are already being subjected to attacks.
The Good News
The good news is that the Fed seems to be acknowledging that the board’s role is that of oversight and that boards are spending far too much time micro-managing compliance and should focus on big picture items such as strategy and risk. Those of us who speak with board members know that this has been a significant concern since the enactment of Dodd-Frank.Continue Reading Federal Reserve governance guidance: the pendulum swings back (?)
I don’t know when Congress decided that every piece of legislation had to have a nifty acronym, but the House Financial Services Committee recently passed (on a partisan basis) what old-fashioned TV ads might have called the new, improved version of the “Financial CHOICE Act”. The word “choice” is in solid caps because it stands for “Creating Hope and Opportunity for Investors, Consumers and Entrepreneurs”.
Whether and for whom it creates hope, opportunity or something else entirely may depend upon your perspective, but whatever else can be said of the Act, it is long (though at 589 pages, it is slightly more than half as long as Dodd-Frank), and it addresses a very broad swath of issues. Here’s what it has to say about some key issues in disclosure, governance and capital formation, along with some commentary.
Continue Reading The Financial CHOICE Act – everything you’ve ever wanted, and more?
As reported by Broc Romanek in his recent blog post, the SEC recently posted five new CDIs related to the CEO pay ratio rules contained in Item 402(u) of Regulation S-K. In order to provide a very brief summary in a fun way, I’ve composed
We are pleased to provide a posting from our colleague, Holly L. Griffin, an attorney in Gunster’s Labor and Employment practice group.
Within the course of one week, the SEC took administrative action against two companies for language contained within severance agreements which restricted employee rights to obtain a monetary award for reports of potential law violations to the SEC. The SEC took aim at two types of provisions which commonly appear in severance agreements: the confidentiality clause and the waiver of rights.
Background
In one of the cases, the company required all employees accepting severance pay to sign an agreement that contained a clause prohibiting disclosure of company confidential information and trade secrets, except when the employee is compelled by law to disclose the information. In the event the employee was required to disclose company confidential information, the agreement required the employee to provide notice to the company. The SEC determined that the confidentiality agreement put former employees between a rock and a hard place if they wanted to report potential law violations; they could either identify themselves as a whistleblower to the company by providing notice, or risk breaching the agreement and forfeiting severance by disclosing confidential information.
In both matters, the companies required all employees accepting severance to sign an agreement that contained a waiver of rights. Although the severance agreements did not prohibit the employees from reporting or participating in an investigation into a potential law violation, they explicitly prohibited the employees from receiving monetary compensation for such reports. The SEC found both companies in violation of an SEC Rule which prohibits public companies from taking action which impede a whistleblower from communicating with the SEC regarding possible law violations. Congress enacted the “Dodd-Frank Act with the stated purpose of encouraging whistleblowers to report potential law violations to the SEC, by offering financial incentives or awards for reports. The SEC determined that requiring employees to waive their right to financial recovery undermines the public policy purpose behind the Dodd-Frank Act and violates SEC rules.
Both companies were required to notify former employees of the ruling and to pay monetary civil penalties, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars each. One company was also required to amend its severance agreements to include a section titled “Protected Rights,” which notified employees of the right to report any suspected law violation to a governmental agency and to receive an award for providing such information.
My favorite quote of the week seems to have gone largely unnoticed, despite the fact that I tweeted about it and told several people about it. The quote, attributed to former Congressman Barney Frank, was “people expect too much from boards”. If you don’t believe me, you can find it here – in the venerable New York Times, no less.
Am I the only one who thinks that the statement, particularly considering the source, is offensive? Am I the only one who thinks that the co-sponsor of the legislation that bears his name, and the author and/or instigator of many of its provisions that imposed extensive obligations on boards, saying that we expect too much from boards is similar to the child who kills his parents throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan?
In fairness to Mr. (no longer Congressman) Frank (not that I feel compelled to be fair to him), he is also quoted to have said that the most important oversight of financial companies comes not from its directors but from regulators. If that’s the case, however, why does the eponymous legislation bother to impose so many burdens on boards? Why not leave it all to the regulators (or would that leave the plaintiffs’ bar in the lurch)? Alternatively, why not expand the concept of mandatory say on pay votes (which the Dodd-Frank Act imposes upon most publicly held companies) to everything a board does and do away with the board entirely? Need a new plant? Put it to a shareholder vote! Want to think about entering new line of business? How about a say on that?Continue Reading Politician, heal thyself
After much foot dragging, I have finished reading the adopting release for the new pay ratio disclosure rules. Yes, the release is long (300 pages or so), but adopting releases are always long. The real reason why it took so long is that the whole concept of pay ratio disclosure just seems silly to me (and apparently to Bob Lamm as well) so I just hoped it would go away.
I am not against finding ways to strengthen the middle class. Just like I am not against ending the sale of certain minerals in Central Africa that end up funding deadly conflict. The problem I have is that public companies should not have to bear the complete burden of fixing social ills. Less than 1% of the 27 million companies in the United States are publicly traded. And there are plenty of private companies that are larger than most publicly traded companies. Thus, while we may not agree whether the social goals are worth achieving, I think we can all agree that there are better ways to achieve them than selective enforcement (particularly since the SEC itself has said that the pay ratio will not be comparable from one company to another). The Securities Edge has been criticizing the social disclosure movement for some time, but we haven’t yet seemed to have stopped Congress from continuing to go down that path.
So, unless Congress acts to reverse its mandate for public companies to disclose their pay ratios before 2018 (the first year of required disclosure), I suppose we should all start learning how to comply. Leading practices for calculating the ratio and providing narrative disclosure will develop over the next couple of years, but I have summarized the important parts of the rules in this post:
What is the required disclosure?
Registrants must disclose:
The ratio needs to be expressed as X:1 or X to 1 where “X” represents the CEO’s total compensation and “1” represents the median employee’s salary. The ratio can also be expressed in narrative form such as: “The CEO’s annual total compensation is X times the median employee’s annual total compensation.” You can’t
Continue Reading Pay ratio (unfortunately) coming to public company filings soon