TheCorporateCounsel.net

June 7, 2010

The RAFSA: A Detailed Timeline & List of Processes to Pass the Bill

Thanks to Michele Kulerman of Hogans Lovell for this rundown on how the timeline and processes of passing Congress’ financial reform bill – the “Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010” – goes from here:

The Congress returns to Washington this week, anticipating an intense month of negotiations to complete consideration of sweeping financial services regulatory reform. Because each chamber must pass identical bills before the President can sign reform into law, an ad hoc “conference committee” will be named to work through the differences between the House and Senate bills.

Members of the conference committee are selected independently by House and Senate leaders from both parties, and drawn from senior members of the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee. They are expected to be named Tuesday, June 8th. Party ratios in the conference reflect the parties’ ratio in each chamber. The conference on this bill will be chaired by the House, so Barney Frank (D-MA), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee will preside.

The first public meeting of the conference will take place Thursday, June 10 and this session and all subsequent meetings will likely be broadcast live via C-SPAN. The opening session will be devoted to member statements and may provide insight into possible avenues of compromise on open issues.

Staffers have been working for the past two weeks on the text which the conferees will use. The Senate amendment to the House bill, HR 4173, will serve as the base text, with added House-approved language related to mortgage reform and the hiring of minorities and women by the regulatory agencies. In addition, a side-by-side comparison of provisions in both bills is usually prepared. Both documents should be publicly available sometime next week.

The conferees will meet again June 15-17 and June 22-23 in open session to rewrite the text. Obviously, a lot of the work will take place behind the scenes, and the public meetings are as likely to highlight political differences in an election year as they are to debate differences in a spirit of compromise.

The conferees hope to conclude their work by the 24th by filing the conference report that day. The report – the text of the compromise bill – is usually accompanied by a Statement of Managers which reviews the need for the legislation, details the differences between the two versions, and explains the agreed-upon compromise.

The plan is for the House to act first, starting June 28th, and for the Senate to act in time to send the bill to the President by the end of the week.

Trends in Audit Fees and Non-Audit Fees

Recently, Audit Analytics released its annual “Audit Fees and Non-Audit Fees” report, a seven-year analysis focusing on fiscal years 2002 through 2008. The report examines the fees paid by 2,924 accelerated filers that disclosed fees in each year covered by the study, with the findings including:

– After 4 years of steady decline from 2002 to 2006, non-audit fees as a percentage of total fees have leveled off in 2007 and 2008.
– For the third year in a row, non-audit fees represented only about 21% of the total fees paid by accelerated filers, down from 51% in 2002.
– While the total audit fees increased steadily over the period examined, audit fees as a percentage of revenue decreased since 2005 and now stand at $556 per million dollars of revenue.

Navigating Corp Fin’s Comment Process

We have posted the transcript of our recent webcast: “Navigating Corp Fin’s Comment Process.”

– Broc Romanek