At today’s Practising Law Institute SEC Speaks annual program, Acting Chair Piwowar made opening remarks.  During his wide-ranging discussion, Acting Chair Piwowar, inspired by William Graham Sumner’s the “forgotten man” referred throughout to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investor protection mission and the objective of keeping in mind the interests of the “forgotten investor.”  Piwowar commented on the Commission’s focus on effective disclosure requirements and the need to be guided by the concept of materiality in formulating disclosure requirements.  He pointed to various specialized disclosure requirements introduced by the Dodd-Frank Act, including the resource extraction, conflict minerals and related matters.  Piwowar noted the importance of avoiding disclosure overload.  Piwowar also commented on Regulation D and questioned the utility of applying the “accredited investor” standard as a means of identifying individual investors that do not require the protection of the disclosures associated with registered offerings.

Providing a glimpse into upcoming actions, Piwowar noted that the Commission will consider whether to propose a request to comment on the requirements of Industry Guide 3 for offerings by financial services companies, consideration of a final rule requiring registrants that file registration statements and periodic and current reports that are subject to the exhibit requirements under Item 601 of Regulation S-K, or that file on Forms F-10 or 20-F, to include a hyperlink to each exhibit listed in the exhibit index of these filings and in order to enable the inclusion of such hyperlinks, to require that registrants submit all such filings in HTML format (see the proposed rule:  https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2016/33-10201.pdf), a proposed rule relating to the use of inline XBRL data in filings, and amendments to Rule 15c2-12 relating to muni disclosures.