The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Fri, 08 May 2026 11:32:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png The SEC Delays its Consideration of Rules Requiring Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 The SEC Delays its Consideration of Rules Requiring Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/12/02/the-sec-delays-its-consideration-of-rules-requiring-disclosure-of-corporate-political-spending/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-sec-delays-its-consideration-of-rules-requiring-disclosure-of-corporate-political-spending https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2013/12/02/the-sec-delays-its-consideration-of-rules-requiring-disclosure-of-corporate-political-spending/#comments Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:46:31 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=56087?d=20141216094023EST Posted by Lucian Bebchuk, Harvard Law School, and Robert J. Jackson, Jr., Columbia Law School, on Monday, December 2, 2013
Editor's Note:

Lucian Bebchuk is Professor of Law, Economics, and Finance at Harvard Law School. Robert J. Jackson, Jr. is Associate Professor of Law, Milton Handler Fellow, and Co-Director of the Millstein Center at Columbia Law School. Bebchuk and Jackson served as co-chairs of the Committee on Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending, which filed a rulemaking petition requesting that the SEC require public companies to disclose their political spending, discussed on the Forum here. Bebchuk and Jackson are also co-authors of Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending, recently published in the Georgetown Law Journal. A series of posts in which Bebchuk and Jackson respond to objections to an SEC rule requiring disclosure of corporate political spending is available here.

Last week the Securities and Exchange Commission released its regulatory agenda, and this agenda no longer includes rules requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics. The agenda now includes only overdue rules that the SEC is required to develop under Dodd-Frank and the JOBS Act. While we are disappointed by the SEC’s decision to delay its consideration of rules requiring disclosure of corporate political spending, we hope that the SEC will consider such rules as soon as it is able to devote resources to rulemaking other than that required by Dodd-Frank and the JOBS Act. The submissions to the SEC over the past two years have clearly demonstrated the compelling case and large support for requiring such disclosure.

We co-chaired a committee of ten corporate and securities law professors that filed a rulemaking petition urging the SEC to develop rules requiring public companies to disclose their spending on politics. In the two years since the petition was submitted, the SEC has received more than 600,000 comment letters on our petition—more than on any other rulemaking project in the Commission’s history. The overwhelming majority of these comments—including letters from institutional investors and Members of Congress—have been supportive of the petition. At the end of 2012, the Director of the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance acknowledged the widespread support for the petition, and the Commission placed the rulemaking petition on its regulatory agenda for 2013.

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