SEC Announces "21st Century Disclosure"

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced an ambitious effort to examine fundamental questions about the way it acquires information from public companies, mutual funds, brokers, and other regulated entities, and the way it makes that information available to investors and the markets. The study will review all existing SEC reporting requirements, with a special focus on needless redundancy. It will also consider ways to get the best real-time distribution of financial and narrative disclosure to investors. Finally, the study will examine how best to integrate public disclosure with the SEC's proposed new post-EDGAR architecture for investor search, assembly, and comparison of data. (View the SEC Press Release.)