June 13, 2014
There are far too many requirements for disclosures that warn the investors of the potential for this or that event to cause a failure. Yet, the wording of the disclosure is not controlled by regulation in most cases, so there are hundreds of variations of ways to say almost exactly the same thing and everybody does it a little bit differently.
It would be far better in my opinion if as much of the standard boiler plate warnings as possible could be reduced to standardized language in a questionnaire form, always in the same order, and only answered with YES, NO, NA.
Benefits:
1) More of the meaningful matter would become easier for all readers to comprehend without all the clutter.
2). Regulators and reviewers would know the precise language and not have to be verifying the language just verifying or reviewing the answers.