SEC proposal to end mandatory quarterly reporting draws opposition

In September 2025, President Donald Trump said that US companies should only have to report earnings twice a year, rather than quarterly. SEC Chair Paul Atkins was quick to jump on the idea, telling reporters on September 29 that the agency was “working to fast track it” and that he hoped to have a proposal ready for public comment by late 2025 or early 2026.

That proposal has yet to appear, but the SEC’s still mulling a move away from quarterly reporting, as its March 2026 meeting of the Investor Advisory Committee showed. Biannual reporting was one of the hot topics discussed, along with potentially streamlining the rules governing nonfinancial, qualitative disclosures under Regulation S-K.

Atkins didn’t mention reporting cadence directly in his opening remarks. Noting that he favored the “minimum effective dose of regulation,” the chair said that rules should be “sensible and disciplined, with materiality as our North Star,” and that regulations “must scale with a company’s size and maturity.”

Quarterly reporting defended. A panel of experts from investment and law firms were in favor of trimming or modernizing Reg. S-K, but balked at the notion of moving to biannual reporting. Quarterly reporting, Stephen Berger, global head of government and regulatory policy at investment firm Citadel, said, “allows investors to make more informed investment decisions. That leads to more accurate market valuations, that better optimizes the allocation of capital to the real economy.”

Biannual reporting would raise the cost of capital, Neil Constable, head of quantitative research and investments at Fidelity, argued. If investors have less information, he said, they’ll likely “be slower to build conviction” and to put money into companies, restricting capital flow. That’s especially the case for smaller companies, he said, which are often in a growth phase and so are riskier bets.

A shift away from quarterly reporting could even rattle the stock markets, Constable said. Having less data could make investors uneasy and more likely to sell, “so it could create more volatility in the markets,” he said. “It’ll in some ways disincentivize long-term holding.”

Berger disagreed with the claim that quarterly reporting poses an undue burden on companies. “It’s probably done internally anyway already, on a frequency that’s even more frequent than quarterly,” he said.

S-K needs a trim: Panelists agreed that Regulation S-K had become too bloated and unwieldy.

“We can preserve the benefits of having trusted, robust, and timely reporting of material financial information by public companies while streamlining that reporting,” Berger said. He singled out the risk factors section as part of S-K that had strayed from its original function. “Risk factors have evolved more into not disclosures by management for investors, but by lawyers for other lawyers,” he said, claiming they’ve become “a tool for establishing liability defenses.”

Bob Downes, a partner at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, said that his firm had long advocated for “imposing an overarching materiality standard on Regulation S-K.” He feels that could be accomplished by adding a statement to the regulation saying that “the issuer may omit any information that’s otherwise called for by a line item of Regulation S-K on the grounds that it’s not material.”

Is regulation hampering IPOs? Panelists were divided on whether, as Atkins has stated, regulation is a barrier to IPO formation. Constable said that “removing regulatory burden,” in his opinion, “will increase the number of public listings.” He notes that regulation can be “a real material cost that hits the profitability of companies” but that it also carries “implicit costs” in terms of time and labor.

Rick Werner, a partner at law firm Haynes and Boone, said that regulation was only one of the factors making companies hesitant to go public. “It’s not the disclosure burden necessarily that is their first concern,” he said. “It’s the cost of D&O [directors and officers] insurance and strike suits and dealing with that, and that really becomes the main trepidation that we hear.”

Downes said other factors were behind the decline in IPOs. “I don’t think it’s necessarily periodic reporting or the level of disclosure that is disincentivizing companies to go public,” he said. “I think there are other things going on in our economy” that account for it, “including the strength of the private markets.”