A consensus is beginning to emerge that the Securities and Exchange Commission should scrap its 20-year-old system of electronically filed periodic reports—although nobody knows just what new system should be built to haul the SEC into the 21st century.
The Commission held a roundtable last week to discuss its 21st Century Disclosure Initiative, an idea hatched before the credit crisis swept all other regulatory priorities to the back burner. Still, the SEC assembled a panel of notables Oct. 8 to push the matter forward, and talk centered on how to abandon the existing EDGAR filing system in favor of one designed ...