Tag: disclosure of payments by resource extraction issuers

What’s on the Agenda—the SEC’s Regulatory Flexibility Agenda, that is?

SEC Chair Jay Clayton has repeatedly made a point of his intent to take the Regulatory Flexibility Act Agenda ”seriously,” streamlining it to show what the SEC actually expected to take up in the subsequent period. (See this PubCo post and this PubCo post.)  The agenda has just been released, and it certainly appears that Clayton has been true to his word: several items that had taken up long-term residency on numerous prior agendas seem to be absent from this one.

What’s happening with those SEC proposals for Dodd-Frank clawbacks and disclosure of pay for performance and hedging? Apparently, not much.

As noted in this article from Law360, the SEC’s latest Regulatory Flexibility Agenda, which identifies those regs that the SEC intends to propose or adopt in the coming year— and those deferred for a later time—has now been posted.  The Agenda shifts to the category of long-term actions most of the Dodd-Frank compensation-related items that had previously been on the short-term agenda—not really a big surprise given the deregulatory bent of the new administration.  Keep in mind, however, that the Agenda has no binding effect and, in this case, could be even less prophetic than usual; the Preamble to the SEC’s Agenda indicates that it reflects “only the priorities of the Acting Chairman [Michael Piwowar], and [does] not necessarily reflect the view and priorities of any individual Commissioner.”  It also indicates that information in the Agenda was accurate as of March 29, 2017.  As a result, it does not necessarily reflect the views of the new SEC Chair, Jay Clayton, who was not confirmed in that post until May.