SEC to Reconsider Quarterly Reporting

At the urging of President Trump, the Securities and Exchange Commission will consider whether to eliminate quarterly reporting. In a social media post on September 15, the President said, “Subject to SEC Approval, Companies and Corporations should no longer be forced to ‘Report’ on a quarterly basis (Quarterly Reporting!), but rather to Report on a ‘Six (6) Month Basis.’” He asserted that semi-annual reporting would allow management to “focus on properly running their companies.” President Trump made a similar suggestion during his first term, and the SEC responded by issuing a release inviting public comment on whether quarterly reporting should be ended and convening a public roundtable.  However, the Commission took no action on the idea during the first Trump Administration. 

SEC Chair Paul Atkins seems to share the President’s view and will apparently restart regulatory consideration of making quarterly reporting optional.  In a September 29 opinion piece in the Financial Times, Mr. Atkins wrote:

“It is time for the SEC to remove its thumb from the scales and allow the market to dictate the optimal reporting frequency based on factors such as the industry, size and investor expectations. Mandatory quarterly reporting is hardly a cornerstone of the dynamism that distinguishes our capital markets. Giving companies the option to report semi-annually is not a retreat from transparency. Instead, it puts a renewed focus on market-driven disclosure practices that favor the interests of companies and their investors over prescriptive regulatory mandates.”

As noted in Springtime in Washington: The SEC’s Regulatory Agenda, September 2025 Update, the SEC’s most recent regulatory agenda includes an item entitled “Rationalization of Disclosure Practices” with a projected publication by April 2026 for public comment of “rule amendments to rationalize disclosure practices to facilitate material disclosure by companies and shareholders’ access to that information.”  That initiative could serve as a vehicle for a proposal to eliminate mandatory quarterly reporting.

Ending quarterly reporting would reduce public company compliance costs and could ease short-term performance pressures.  This, in turn, would potentially allow management to focus more on long-term strategy and growth.  Eliminating quarterly reporting would also make U.S. disclosure requirements more comparable to those of some foreign jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom.  However, investors would strongly oppose less frequent reporting.  Ending quarterly reporting would reduce transparency and increase information asymmetry between management and the market. Less frequent reporting would make it harder for investors and analysts to assess company performance in real time and could also provide more opportunities and incentives for insider trading.

Eliminating mandatory quarterly reporting would have significant implications for public company audit committees. Oversight of Form 10-Q reporting is an important audit committee responsibility, and ending the requirement to make such filings could free up time that committees would then be able to devote to other responsibilities.  On the other hand, companies would face difficult decisions about what financial and other information, if any, to disclose between semi-annual reports and in what format to make those disclosures.  Oversight of these judgments and of the resulting unregulated disclosures might prove to be more complex and time-consuming than oversight of quarterly Form 10-Q reporting.