On September 13, 2017, the SEC Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies held an open meeting to discuss the Sarbanes-Oxley (“SOX”) auditor attestation requirement, the final report that will be issued prior to the expiration of the Committee’s current charter and whether updates are needed to Securities Act Rule 701. In its discussion of the SOX auditor attestation requirement, the Committee considered the associated compliance costs and a proposal to change the “smaller reporting company” (“SRC”) and “non-accelerated filer” definitions to a company with either (1) a public float of less than $250 million or annual revenues of less than $100 million. The SEC’s proposed amendments to the SRC definition from June 2016 did not cover non-accelerated filers. The Committee then discussed its draft report to the SEC, which emphasized a number of recommendations it has made in the past, including the following:

  • Providing regulatory certainty for finders, private placement brokers and platforms that are not registered as broker-dealers and are involved in primary and secondary offerings of unregistered securities in order to help smaller businesses raise capital.
  • Supporting an expansion of the “accredited investor” definition to take into account measures of sophistication, regardless of income or net worth, thereby expanding rather than contracting the pool of accredited investors.
  • Extending to SRCs the same accommodations made to EGCs with respect to disclosure requirements, and finalizing the proposed amendments to increase the financial thresholds in the SRC definition and revising the definition of “accelerated filer” to include companies with a public float of $250 million or more, but less than $700 million.
  • Amending Item 407(c)(2) of Regulation S-K to require issuers to describe, in addition to their policy with respect to diversity, if any, the extent to which their boards are in fact diverse, by including disclosure regarding race, gender and ethnicity of each board member.
  • Preempting state regulation of secondary trading in securities of Tier 2 Regulation A issuers that are current in their ongoing reports in order to improve secondary market liquidity.
  • Allowing smaller exchange-listed companies to voluntary choose trading increments or tick-sizes greater than the one penny in order to help small and mid-cap companies raise capital.

The Committee then turned to a discussion of various proposed changes to Securities Act Rule 701, including, among others, removing the requirement that consultants be “natural persons,” removing the $5 million aggregate limitation (the “hard cap limit”), clarifying that material amendments to any security previously issued under Rule 701 does not result in a new grant or sale, clarifying the application of Rule 701 to RSUs, clarifying that expanded disclosure is only required to be provided for sales that occur after the hard cap limit is exceeded, and clarifying the timing and delivery requirements for expanded disclosure.

A copy of the Committee’s draft report is available here.