|
 |
SEC to Make Public Staff Letters to Firms May 10, 2005 (Associated Press) The Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday that it will begin to make public this week its staff's comments to companies about their financial reports, stock offerings and other required disclosure documents, a move that will provide investors with new information. The SEC originally announced the initiative last June, saying it would begin publishing the staff comment letters on its Web site in August. The move was delayed by technical problems, agency officials have said. The letters from SEC staff to companies and mutual funds as well as their responses to the SEC examiners will be made public starting Thursday, for company filings made after Aug. 1, 2004. In some instances, information deemed confidential will be withheld. That likely would include material related to pending investigations of companies by the SEC or other agencies, which is exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act. The move opens a window for investors into the concerns, large and small, of the SEC examiners who pore over thousands of pages of company filings, and the related exchanges between the agency staff and the companies. Consumer advocates have called it beneficial and unusual, because it provides public access to the sort of deliberations that are usually kept private, reserved for company officials and lawyers. The SEC has said that it has been deluged with thousands of requests for the comment letters and companies' responses under the Freedom of Information Act. Some firms have made a business of submitting FOIA requests for the material and, after obtaining it from the SEC, selling it to clients. The fallout from the wave of corporate scandals beginning with Enron Corp.'s collapse in late 2001 also focused attention on companies' regulatory filings. "We believe it is appropriate to expand the transparency of our comment process by making this information available, free of charge, to an unlimited audience," Alan Beller, director of the SEC's corporation finance division, said in a statement issued Monday. The material will be released 45 days or more after the agency examiners complete their review of a company's filing. It will be put on the system on the SEC Web site, known as Edgar, that carries the corporate filings themselves. --- On the Net: Securities and Exchange Commission: http://www.sec.gov |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
