Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins spoke at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, outlining plans to reduce public disclosure requirements and facilitate the launch of new, smaller companies via initial public offerings.
“One of my priorities as chairman is to reform the SEC’s disclosure rules with two goals in mind,” Atkins said. “First, the SEC must root its disclosure requirements in the concept of financial materiality. Second, these requirements must scale with a company’s size and maturity.”
Atkins’ speech was the latest in a series of comments by the chair and by President Donald Trump suggesting ways to deregulate financial markets, including by reducing mandatory financial disclosure for public corporations to twice per year from the current quarterly standard. Disclosure reforms would combat the “regulatory creep” that public companies have dealt with in the last 20 years by updating the rules concerning disclosures and proxy statements, Atkins said.
“These decades of accretive rulemakings have produced reams of paperwork that can do more to obscure than to illuminate,” Atkins said. “Today’s lengthy annual reports and proxy statements impose substantial costs on companies because they consume significant time from boards and management, and … despite these costs, investors sometimes do not benefit from the information because they struggle to parse and understand it—or find it so intimidating because of the volume and density that they ignore it.”
According to Atkins, disclosures have become strenuous to the point that they are “information overload for investors.”
“When the SEC’s disclosure regime has been hijacked to require information unmoored from materiality, investors do not benefit,” Atkins said.
Atkins, who was confirmed in April, expanded on his wish to have requirements scale with a company’s size by saying the SEC should consider thresholds that separate “large companies” subject to all disclosure rules from “small companies” subject to only some of them.
Outside of disclosures, Atkins offered two other pillars for making IPOs “great again.” Atkins said the second pillar involves “de-politicizing shareholder meetings” by reducing their focus to voting on director elections and important corporate matters. He also said the SEC should “reform the litigation landscape for securities lawsuits to eliminate frivolous complaints.”
He added that the SEC should, however, maintain “an avenue for shareholders to continue to bring forth meritorious claims.”
According to Atkins, the reforms would be a boon to IPOs, which he argues should be available to all companies.
“Raising capital through an IPO should not be a privilege reserved for those few ‘unicorns,’” he said. “More and more, public investments are concentrated in a handful of companies that are generally in the same one or two industries. Our regulatory framework should provide companies in all stages of their growth and from all industries with the opportunity for an IPO, particularly an IPO that represents a capital-raising mechanism for the company, instead of a liquidity event for insiders.”
The five-member SEC (no more than three members may come from a single party) has only four current commissioners, and the extension of the term of Caroline Crenshaw, the lone Democrat, expires in January 2026. Trump has not nominated a replacement for former Commissioner Jaime Lizárraga, a Democrat who resigned in January 2025, which could leave the commission with only three members, all Republicans.