As has been rumored, the SEC announced today that William H. Hinman will be the new director for the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance.
Mr. Hinman, who recently retired as a securities and corporate finance partner from the Silicon Valley office of Simpson
In the hopefully unlikely event you were wonder
ing if the compromise on government funding changed things vis-à-vis possible SEC rulemaking on political contributions disclosure, rest easy (or not, as the case may be).
The bar on such rulemaking that has been in place since the last appropriations bill (and, if memory serves me correctly, one or more previous appropriations bills) remains in place. However, the appropriations bill does not prohibit the SEC from addressing any of the remaining mandates under Dodd-Frank; the CHOICE Act that’s rumbling around Congress would prohibit work on those items.Continue Reading Breaking news!!!! Nothing has changed!!!
If you have ever had to search for an exhibit originally filed with the SEC years ago, you know it can take forever, particularly when the exhibit consists of an original document that has been amended several times, each amendment having been separately filed.
You will soon have to search no more, because the SEC is about to make it easier for you. On March 1, the SEC adopted a final rule requiring public companies to include a hyperlink to each exhibit listed in the exhibit index to all filings subject to Item 601 of SEC Regulation S-K. The rule will take effect on September 1 for most companies. (“Smaller reporting companies” and companies that are neither “large accelerated filers” nor “accelerated filers” and that submit filings in ASCII get a one-year reprieve.)Continue Reading The missing (hyper) link
As noted in a recent post, the future of SEC regulation – and perhaps even of the SEC itself – is uncertain in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. However, the SEC Staff, a smart, decent and hardworking group, continues to stick to its knitting despite the turmoil.
The most recent example of the Staff’s diligence is a “Report on Modernization and Simplification of Regulation S-K – As Required by Section 72003 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act”. The Report was issued on Thanksgiving Eve, and it’s no turkey. Don’t be put off by the incredibly long title or by the fact that SEC regulations have nothing to do with Surface Transportation. The Report provides a good summary of some actions impacting Reg S-K that have been taken to date, and the Staff’s recommendations for actions down the road (assuming there is a road).
Here are some of the highlights of things that may be on the come:
Continue Reading SEC Staff’s Thanksgiving Gift: No Turkey
It remains to be seen whether the new administration will actually drain the swamp or do away with political correctness, but one hope that some of us have – regardless of our views on the election – is that the SEC may finally get around to some issues that have been on the back burner for years.
One such issue is a long-overdue overhaul of the rules surrounding shareholder proposals, including the submission and resubmission thresholds for proposals under SEC Rule 14a-8. Many organizations, including the Society for Corporate Governance, have repeatedly urged the SEC to update these rules, which have been in place for many years. However, the SEC has been reluctant to plunge into the area due to the likely political firestorm that would result.
Now, another organization has jumped in. At the end of October, the Business Roundtable published “Modernizing the Shareholder Proposal Process”, a rational and well thought-out series of suggestions for bringing shareholder proposals into the 21st Century.Continue Reading A modest proposal about more modest proposals
In the wake of the election of Donald Trump as the next President, there has been a lot of speculation about the effect of a Trump administration on securities law and corporate governance. Looking into a crystal ball is always risky, but here are some observations.
Conflict Minerals: It’s too soon to tell whether Dodd-Frank will be repealed in its entirety, if it will die the death of 1,000 cuts, or if it will stay pretty much as is. What I will say is that few will cry if the conflict minerals provisions are eliminated (and I will not be among those few). Complying with the conflict minerals rules is time-consuming (and therefore costly), and it’s questionable whether many people care. Perhaps of equal or greater importance is that there is some evidence that the conflict minerals requirements are actually hurting the people they were supposed to help.
Pay Ratio: More of the same here. There is some support for pay ratio disclosure among labor pension funds, but that’s about it. Companies don’t like it (duh…), and mainstream investors have no use for it. Given how the Democrats seem to have fared in the industrial states, it’s not clear that they would fall on their collective sword to save this one.
Continue Reading The SEC’s brave new (Trump) world
In the midst of the chaos of the presidential election, vicious attacks from Senator Warren, and goodness knows what else, the SEC continues to crank out requests for comment, rules and interpretations.
It’s the latter category that has attracted our attention lately, as the Staff has focused on some technical matters that securities counsel have been pondering for a while.
401(k) plans with a self-directed “brokerage window”
First, in September, the SEC published updated Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations, including one on 401(k) plans that feature a so-called “brokerage window”. It’s been generally assumed that if a plan does not include an employer stock fund in which employee funds can be invested, Securities Act registration is not required. This CDI says “maybe not” – if the plan (a) permits employer and employee contributions to be invested through a self-directed “brokerage window”, and (b) the plan does not prohibit investments in employer stock through the window, registration may be required.Continue Reading The SEC Keeps On Keeping On
If you’ve been reading our posts (and probably even if you haven’t), you should know by now that the SEC has launched a “disclosure effectiveness” initiative and has already taken actions to make some disclosures more “effective”. One such action was the publication of a 341-page “concept” release asking hundreds of questions about whether and how to address a wide range of disclosure issues. More recently, the SEC has proposed rule changes that would eliminate some particularly pesky disclosure burdens.
Continue Reading Moving Rapidly into the 90s
On July 14, the SEC Staff published a new Compliance and Disclosure Interpretation clarifying when an investor who may not be entirely passive may nonetheless remain eligible to file a beneficial ownership report on Schedule 13G rather than Schedule 13D. Anyone who has tried to dance on the head of that pin will be relieved, particularly given the far greater disclosure burdens associated with the latter filing.
All other things being equal, the rules specify that a shareholder may file on the less burdensome Schedule 13G only if it acquired or is holding the subject equity securities with neither the purpose nor effect of changing or influencing control of the issuer. However, the rules are not clear as to whether some actions (or an intent to engage in those actions) may make the 13G unavailable.Continue Reading To 13G or not to 13G
In recent years, the SEC – frequently due to Congressional mandates – has reduced the amount of disclosure that smaller public companies must provide. Most recently, on June 27, the SEC proposed yet another rule that would reduce disclosure burdens by enabling more companies to qualify as “smaller reporting companies,” or “SRCs.”
The proposal would expand the definition of SRCs to cover registrants with less than $250 million in public float and registrants with zero public float if their revenues were below $100 million in the previous year.
If your company is not currently an SRC and you are wondering what relief you might get if you were, the proposing release lays it out in an easy-to-read table:
Continue Reading Smaller gets bigger