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The Securities and Exchange Commission seems ready to push forward with its idea of letting U.S. corporations file financial statements according to International Financial Reporting Standards—even as the clock winds down on current SEC leadership—and many fundamental questions about convergence remain. John White, director of the SEC Division of Corporation Finance, recently gave a speech […]

As corporate scandals go global ever more frequently, so do regulatory enforcement efforts. That’s according to Linda Chatman Thomsen, head of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division. Speaking last week at Compliance Week 2008, Thomsen told some 500 corporate legal and compliance officers that information sharing among regulators is becoming dramatically easier […]

U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had asked states for years to close what he considers a gaping hole in America’s defenses: identifying the “beneficial owners” of newly formed companies. Levin regularly fires off statistics and telling details about the problem: 2 million corporations or limited liability companies formed in […]

Robert Pozen, chairman of MFS Investment Management and a long-time player on the financial and regulator scenes, has always been a critic of complexity in financial reporting. Now, as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission committee trying to reduce that complexity, his job is nearly done. In a keynote speech delivered at the Compliance […]

The latest statistics have arrived on Corporate America’s use of “notice and access,” or e-proxy rules, this season. Two trends are clear: savings are up, and retail voting is down. That’s according to proxy processing firm Broadridge, which has compiled data on 566 companies that have used the new notice-and-access rules that went into effect […]

Anyone expecting a flurry of Securities and Exchange Commission rulemaking this week to beat a June 1 deadline on new proposals could be disappointed—the mandate doesn’t apply to independent agencies like the SEC. The deadline, set forth in a May 9 memo by White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, called for any new regulations […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting has kept itself busy this spring. In February, it issued a progress report that summarized its potential recommendations to simplify financial reporting; in March and May, it held follow-up meetings to discuss those ideas more thoroughly. I’ve already written about CIFR’s recommendation regarding […]

A Securities and Exchange Commission plan to revise the reporting requirements for foreign private issuers is drawing both cheers and jeers from the issuer community. As part of a broader effort to modernize its rules that apply to FPIs, the SEC in February proposed a series of measures—dubbed the Foreign Issuer Reporting Enhancements, or the […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking comment on proposed revisions to its rules governing cross-border mergers and acquisitions that would make it easier for U.S. investors to exercise their rights in foreign transactions. The Commission wants to revise the rules, which were adopted in 1999, to expand the availability of the cross-border exemptions and […]

Calls have already come from the Treasury Department for some regulator to step up the oversight of investment banks to prevent another Bear Stearns-like fiasco. Now the Securities and Exchange Commission says it is just the agency to do so. SEC officials fired off a series of remarks last week to that end, saying that […]