SEC sets up interactive data office
THE U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) continues its steady march on the road to mandatory XBRL reporting with the creation of a new office inside the agency. David Blaszkowsky, 45, an 11-year veteran of McGraw-Hill and its Standard & Poor’s division, will quarterback the SEC-wide “disclosure modernization program” as director of the new Office [...]
10-K wraps and unaccountable management
IT’S my view that investor relations at public companies has become more and more a compliance function and less of a communications one. I think the best example of this is the advent of the 10-K wrap. In just a few years, these phone books masquerading as shareholder communications have gone from relative obscurity to [...]
What SEC’s Cox almost said about XBRL
A WEEK or so ago, the Financial Times seemed to jump to conclusions when it reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was working on a rule to make XBRL mandatory for all companies. No other media with any credibility followed up on that story, and in my earlier piece I said I [...]
Media sows more CEO pay confusion
PITY average Americans trying to keep track of what the CEOs of public companies earned last year. Chances are that the pay figures they see reported in their morning newspaper are different than the numbers firms are reporting. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) new rules for [...]
Sun IR should now practice what CEO preaches
LIKE many in the investor relations community, I’ve been following and commenting on the public discussion between Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about Regulation FD and corporate website disclosures. In a letter to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox that he posted on his blog a [...]
Nasdaq's IR services conflicts in the spotlight
By Dominic Jones SIX weeks ago, I said Nasdaq should be forced to sell its press release and website hosting subsidiaries because they create an unacceptable conflict of interest between the exchange’s business interests and its role as a regulator. You can see my original comments in Nasdaq should get out of press release, website [...]
SEC assessing blogs for disclosure, says Cox
By Dominic Jones THE U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is continuing to weigh whether to allow companies to use website and blog postings instead of news releases for investor disclosure. Chairman Christopher Cox told a Reuters Regulation Summit in Washington that the dissemination requirements for Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg. FD) that were passed more [...]
Media confused over Nardelli’s pay
SO HOW much did shareowners pay former Home Depot CEO Bob Nardelli over the course of his six years at the helm of the world’s biggest DIY chain? No one seems to know for sure, in part because the figures for 2006 haven’t been published yet. Even so, I’ve seen five different amounts quoted by [...]
Waiting for the Citizen Investors
By Dominic Jones TODAY I ordered a new book with a promising title. Its called The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda and it’s co-authored by three experienced corporate governance and asset-management professionals. I obviously haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve been reading the press coverage and reviews. The central [...]
SEC gets a lesson on late Friday disclosure
EVERYONE knows that if you have bad news to deliver then the best time to do so is late on a Friday afternoon. That’s when reporters are distracted and editors are heading home for the weekend. And probably the most-prized Friday or all is the one just before a Christmas long-weekend. You can be almost [...]
SEC set to give away its XBRL trump card
AT A MEETING tomorrow, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to approve new rules that will allow companies to only mail annual meeting materials to shareholders who specifically ask for them. If it does so, I think the SEC will be giving away the best bargaining chip it has to encourage companies [...]
Yahoo! Finance flags delinquent Nasdaq firms
I DON’T know if this is new or if I just haven’t seen it before, but Yahoo! Finance is posting prominent cautions on summary pages for Nasdaq companies that are behind in their SEC filings. It’s quite jarring when you first see the caution icon and bold message saying company X “is delinquent in its [...]
SEC will require all companies to report in XBRL
THE U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is converting its EDGAR database to use Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), paving the way for mandatory filings in the new interactive financial tagging format. The SEC has awarded three contracts totaling $54 million to transform the agency’s public company disclosure system over the next three years, a major [...]
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