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The Securities and Exchange Commission answered President Donald Trump’s renewed call to drop the requirement that public companies report earnings quarterly, saying in a statement late Monday that they would prioritize the matter.
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“At President Trump’s request, Chairman [Paul] Atkins and the SEC are prioritizing this proposal to further eliminate unnecessary regulatory burdens on companies,” according to a statement sent to CFO Dive late Monday by an SEC spokesperson. The spokesperson in an interview Tuesday declined to comment further on what steps need to be taken by the SEC to change the quarterly reporting requirement.
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The statement came in response to a request for comment on Trump’s social media post Monday morning in which he asserted that, “Subject to SEC Approval, Companies and Corporations should no longer be forced to “Report” on a quarterly basis (Quarterly Reporting!), but rather to Report on a “Six (6) Month Basis,” and said it would save money and allow managers to “focus on properly running their companies.”
The SEC has changed the frequency of reports before: it began requiring semi-annual reporting in 1955, pivoting in 1970 to mandate quarterly reporting for publicly traded companies.
The latest call to reduce the frequency of public company reporting aligns with the Trump administration’s push for deregulation, along with the expectation that Atkins, as the regulatory agency’s new chair, would usher in more targeted enforcement and softer, more collaborative rule making. Among the changes to date: The SEC in March announced it would no longer defend its rule requiring companies to disclose certain climate-related risks in court, with the fate of the climate-risk disclosure regulation now mired in litigation, CFO Dive sister publication ESG Dive reported.
While the process of SEC rule-making can typically take months or years, the timing of potential SEC action on a proposal to switch from quarterly filing requirements to semi annual could be accelerated by the Atkins-led SEC, Robert J. Pawlewicz, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, previously told CFO Dive. “My impression is that ‘normal process’ could be tossed aside with this administration,” he said in an email Monday.
Back during Trump’s first term on Aug. 17, 2018, he made a similar pitch in a social media post. He asserted that top business leaders had told him fewer reports would be better for business and jobs in the U.S., and said he had asked the SEC to study the issue.
Roughly four months later, the SEC issued a formal request for comment on “how we can enhance, or at a minimum maintain, the investor protection attributes of periodic disclosures while reducing administrative and other burdens on reporting companies associated with quarterly reporting,” according to the Dec. 18, 2018 document signed by then SEC Deputy Security Eduardo Aleman.
The document said the SEC was seeking comments on whether its rules should provide “flexibility” on the frequency of the periodic reporting that would free corporate executives from focusing on short-term results or what it called “short-termism,” while maintaining “appropriate investor protection.”
In 2021, then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler, appointed by former President Biden, “quietly dropped” the Trump-era rulemaking related to the nature, content, and timing of quarterly reports, Thomson Reuters reported at the time, citing the regulatory agenda made public on June 11, 2021. Currently the SEC’s Spring formal 2025 agenda does not appear to include the quarterly reporting issue.
The SEC spokesperson Tuesday declined to comment on the status of the regulatory agency’s previous review of the matter.