The Securities and Exchange Commission recently updated its entry in the Office of Management and Budget’s Unified Agenda to indicate that, by April, it plans to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics. Although the Director and Deputy Director of the Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance signaled that the SEC was considering this issue in November, this update provides a firm timetable for SEC action on disclosure of corporate political spending. Moreover, this update makes clear that the SEC’s consideration of this issue will result in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

As co-chairs of the Committee of academics that petitioned the SEC to develop rules requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics, we are pleased that the SEC has indicated that it plans to move forward on these rules, and we are optimistic that rules will soon be in place to give investors the information they need to assess how corporate funds are spent on politics. As we argued in our petition—signed by a broad group of academics with widely varying views on corporate and securities law—the case for requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics is strong.

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