Securities and Exchange Commission July 2007 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The Securities and Exchange Commission is proposing rule amendments relating to our disclosure and reporting requirements for smaller companies under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. We propose to extend the benefits of our current optional disclosure and reporting requirements for smaller companies to a much larger group of companies. The proposals would allow companies with a public float of less than $75 million to qualify for the smaller company requirements, up from $25 million for most companies today. The proposals also would combine for most purposes the ``small business issuer'' and ``non-accelerated filer'' categories of smaller companies into a single category of ``smaller reporting companies.'' In addition, the proposals would maintain the current disclosure requirements for smaller companies contained in Regulation S-B, but integrate them into Regulation S-K. We also are soliciting suggestions for additional ways in which we could better scale our disclosure and reporting requirements to the needs of smaller reporting companies and their investors.

We are adopting rule amendments to extend the current interactive data voluntary reporting program to enable mutual funds voluntarily to submit supplemental tagged information contained in the risk/return summary section of their prospectuses. A mutual fund choosing to tag its risk/return summary information also would continue to file this information in HTML or ASCII format, as currently required. This extension of the voluntary program is intended to help us evaluate the usefulness to investors, third-party analysts, registrants, the Commission, and the marketplace of data tagging and, in particular, of tagging mutual fund information.

The Commission is proposing two exemptions from the registration requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 for compensatory employee stock options. The first exemption would be available to issuers that are not required to file periodic reports under the Exchange Act. The proposed exemption would apply only to the issuer's compensatory employee stock options and would not extend to the class of securities underlying those options. The second exemption would be available to issuers that are required to file those reports because they have registered under Exchange Act Section 12 the class of securities underlying the compensatory employee stock options.