SEC Continues Its Disclosure Simplification Initiative

On March 20, 2019, the SEC amended its disclosure requirements to ease reporting burdens for most public companies. While no individual change is particularly noteworthy, the aggregate impact of the changes should generally simplify the reporting process. A few changes will require modest additional disclosures. The most significant changes are:

• Confidential treatment requests – Very helpfully, the SEC is dispensing with the need to obtain the staff's prior approval of a confidential treatment request before redacting information from certain exhibits when the information is not material and its disclosure would likely cause competitive harm. Because the SEC would not declare registration statements effective if a confidential treatment request were outstanding, this change will remove a potential roadblock for follow-on offerings. (We anticipate that the staff will nonetheless continue to review redactions made in exhibits filed for an IPO.) The new rules