Public comments pushback on SEC plan to relax quarterly earning requirement

Most of the public feedback filed on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to let companies report earnings twice a year instead of four times is not in support of the change. There is also a dispute over a mistyped email address that now threatens the process the agency must follow before it can finalize any change.

The SEC floated the rule on May 5, 2026, in Release No. 33-11414. The rule would give public companies the option to file a semiannual report on a new Form 10-S in place of three quarterly Form 10-Q filings, keeping the annual 10-K.

The same day the proposal went out, Commissioner Mark Uyeda stated that the current cadence of reporting dates back to the post-war industrial era, and it should not be assumed to fit every issuer in 2026.

However, many investors are not buying it right now.

Why are most investors opposed to the SEC change?

Better Markets, a nonprofit investor advocate, reviewed the comments posted on the SEC’s site and found close to 99% against the proposal, according to its group’s chief policy officer, Amanda Fischer, a former SEC chief of staff.

The SEC’s comment page for the rulemaking received tens of thousands of submissions, and the agency has said publicly that it is still working through a backlog of filings to post.

The submissions came from institutional heavyweights and retail traders alike. The Council of Institutional Investors, whose members manage around $5.2 trillion, filed a letter opposing the change.

Its general counsel, Jeff Mahoney, wrote that stretching the interval of reports will impact auditor review and management certification and also make share-price volatility worse. The Council referenced a 2026 CFA Institute survey in which just 35% of respondents backed a move to semiannual reporting.

A Reddit community, r/wallstreetbets, which claims to have 18 million retail traders, filed against the proposal. Its letter stated that the quarterly filing is how a generation of small investors learned to read a balance sheet, often after watching a stock drop on an earnings release and digging into the 10-Q to find out why.

The community says that if the commission cuts the frequency of reports, it will remove the mechanism that they have come to depend on.

Did an ‘s’ affect the feedback submission to the SEC?

A missing “s” in the address that was meant to receive the comments was flagged, with some voices calling it a clerical error. The Federal Register version of the proposal directed commenters to rule-comment@sec.gov.

The designated address the SEC has on its own instructions page, and has used in nearly every rule proposal since at least 2019, is rule-comments@sec.gov, with an “s.”

Better Markets raised the discrepancy in a July 13 letter to Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda, calling the posted address “incorrect” and warning it “undoubtedly deprived some members of the public of the opportunity to express their views.” The comment window had already closed on July 6.

However, an SEC spokesperson confirmed that both addresses are valid.

The SEC repeated that assurance on its comment page. Fischer says she cannot prove what happened but suspects it was a typo. According to her, several people that reported feedback sent to the singular address never surfaced online.

The Administrative Procedure Act requires agencies to share comments and respond to significant ones before adopting a rule. This is also the ground on which a rule gets challenged in court.

Better Markets pointed out that the SEC reopened 11 rules and one request for comment in 2021 and 2022 after a technological error in collecting feedback.

Fischer said the SEC has posted a figure above 66,000 comments, while she believes the true number, which she attributed to Atkins citing it at an internal town hall, could reach 200,000.

What’s at stake for crypto issuers?

The same SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance that is pushing this reporting change is also the one pushing crypto-asset reform under Director Moloney and Chairman Atkins’s Project Crypto.

Atkins says that the rigidity of the 90-day cycle is a distraction that pushes management toward short-term targets.

With this new directive, digital asset firms that are going public would have to stick with quarterly reporting or move to semiannual filings, which is the same choice as any other issuer under the rule.

However, critics say it comes with a transparency tradeoff that favors institutional investors over retailers.

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