TheCorporateCounsel.net

June 24, 2019

Staff Comments: Trend Toward Fewer Comment Letters Accelerates

According to this recent Audit Analytics blog, the trend toward fewer comment letters from the Staff not only continued last year, but accelerated:

The total amount of comment letters stemming from 10-K and 10-Q filings has once again decreased (as shown in the chart below). From 2017 to 2018, total comment letters decreased by roughly 26%, which is slightly steeper than the decline we’ve seen in the past (13% from 2016 to 2017 and 10% from 2015 to 2016). Similarly, the number of conversations largely followed the same declining pattern.

The blog says that the decline in 8-K comment letters was even sharper. Comment letters on 8-K filings plummeted 54.5% between 2017 and 2018, in comparison to 31.5% between 2016 and 2017 and an increase of 112.4% between 2015 and 2016. The 2016 spike in comment letters is attributable to the Staff’s focus on the use of non-GAAP financial data following Corp Fin’s issuance of updated guidance.

Audit Analytics suggests that the reasons for the decline in comments include a nearly 50% decline in the number of reporting companies since the early 2000s and the Staff’s principles-based approach to issuing comments. Last year’s government shutdown may also have contributed, since reviews weren’t performed during that time. But that probably didn’t move the needle much – since only the last 2 weeks of December were affected by the shutdown.

KPMG/PCAOB: Worse Than We Thought?

I consider myself pretty jaded, but if you read my blog when news broke about the scandal involving KPMG personnel’s misappropriation of PCAOB data, you know I was pretty shocked by the magnitude of what was alleged to have happened. The SEC thought this was pretty serious stuff too. Last week, the agency announced that it had reached a settlement with the firm under the terms of which KPMG admitted wrongdoing & agreed to a $50 million civil monetary penalty – which matches the largest fine ever imposed against an audit firm.

As bad as the KPMG situation appeared when it was first revealed, this recent article by MarketWatch.com’s Francine McKenna notes that the SEC’s announcement suggests that the scandal is even worse than originally reported:

The SEC revealed Monday a much larger scandal than was previously known: KPMG auditors, including some senior partners in charge of public company audits, cheated on internal tests related to mandatory ethics, integrity and compliance training, sharing answers with other partners and staff to help them also attain passing scores. In addition, for a period of time up to November 2015, some audit professionals, including one partner, manipulated the system for their exams to lower the scores required to pass.

Twenty-eight of these auditors did so on four or more occasions. Certain audit professionals lowered the required score to the point of passing exams while answering less than 25% of the questions correctly, the SEC says.

Egads. The SEC’s announcement of the settlement indicated that the agency’s investigation was ongoing. Yeah, I bet it is.

SEC Revises Procedure for Authenticating Form ID

Here’s something that Alan Dye recently posted on his “Section 16.net” Blog:

The SEC has announced enhancements to the EDGAR system, one of which affects the submission of Form ID. New filers will now complete an updated online version of Form ID, which is accessible via a hyperlink from sec.gov. Filers will print out the completed version, for manual signature and notarization, and then upload the signed version for submission with the Form ID. The old “courtesy pdf copy” of Form ID previously available for use as an authenticating document has been removed from the SEC’s website.

John Jenkins