June 27, 2012
First, the exemption of a wide swath of companies from key oversight measures is unacceptable and undermines investors faith in the US market.
The acts provisions excusing emerging growth companies from independent accounting requirements, rolling back rules designed to prevent conflicts of interests among ostensibly independent Wall Street analysts, allowing companies to confidentially submit their IPO paperwork prior to actually going public, and making it easier for executives to mask exorbitant and usurious pay packages harms the trust we need to have in our free market system
Supporting crowd-funding irresponsibly is worse that supporting crowd-funding at all.
Finally, the act makes it easier for private companies to grow without registering and disclosing key information to the SEC. Companies can now have as many as 2,000 shareholders (previously the limit was 500).
And less innocuously, alternative investment vehicles like hedge funds can now broadly advertise their wares, echoing a move the SEC made unilaterally in 1992 and then subsequently reversed after realizing just how much fraud it unleashed.
We need to continue to have investment in US businesses. Our cost of capital is better than anywhere else because we protect individual investors from poorly thought out laws like these.It's for both this reason and for the protection of individual investors that we've asking the SEC to protect individual investors against any unintended consequences of the JOBS Act by offering a robust response to its worst parts.
Please do not allow this bad act to come to pass.