By Niels Holch
The coming year is expected to be a very productive and successful advocacy year for NIRI and the investor relations community.
With a new team gearing up at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Congress becoming more active on financial issues, 2026 is promising to be a busy year for public companies at both the SEC and on Capitol Hill.
NIRI is working on a range of issues and opportunities to advance its regulatory and legislative agenda on matters that impact the investor relations profession and the issuer community in 2026.
SEC Regulatory Reform Initiatives
SEC Chairman Paul Atkins announced an initiative in late 2025 to reverse the decline in the number of public companies with a strategy focused on encouraging more companies to go public, and to remain public, by reducing unnecessary regulatory barriers, burdens, and costs.
Public remarks by Chairman Atkins have made it clear that one of his top priorities in this regard will be to reform the SEC’s disclosure rules. The Chairman has two primary goals in this reform effort. First, to ensure that disclosure requirements are rooted in the concept of financial materiality. Second, to scale disclosure requirements to match a public company’s size and maturity.
SEC goals for 2026 are a moving target, but we can report the following updates as of the end of January 2026.
Executive Compensation
The SEC intends to move forward with a major regulatory initiative to update executive compensation requirements. The Commission held a roundtable last summer and opened up a comment letter file for recommendations about how best to amend the current rules.
Semi-Annual Reporting
In a September post on Truth Social, President Trump urged the SEC to move away from requiring public companies to report earnings on a quarterly basis and, instead, adopt a semi-annual schedule.
Several days later, Atkins expressed support for this proposal and stated that the SEC would prepare a rulemaking for public comment.
NIRI conducted a survey on this topic last fall. While a significant majority of participants preferred to continue with quarterly reporting, many respondents strongly supported reducing the regulatory and administrative burdens associated with filing quarterly 10-Q forms. Suggestions included:
- Reducing or eliminating the role of auditors to confirm quarterly financials.
- Eliminating repetitive and duplicative language in 10-Q disclosures through incorporation by reference to other filings.
Regulation S-K
In a January 2026 statement, Atkins announced that he has directed the staff of the Division of Corporation Finance to begin a comprehensive review of Regulation S-K.
The Chairman is concerned that the “myriad requirements of Regulation S-K do not always reflect the information that a reasonable investor would consider important in making an investment or voting decision.”
To facilitate this staff review, the Chairman is requesting comment letters from interested parties with specific recommendations for amending Regulation S-K, with the goal of eliciting disclosure of material information and avoiding compelling the disclosure of immaterial information.
NIRI is planning to gather reform recommendations through a February 2026 member survey and submit a comment letter to the SEC.
Scaled Disclosure
The SEC publishes a listing of all its regulatory initiatives twice per year. The latest version of this Regulatory Agenda indicates a proposed rule to scale corporate disclosure requirements.
Based on speeches and public statements by SEC officials, it is expected that this regulatory proposal will update and modernize filer categories—such as large accelerated filer, accelerated filer, smaller reporting company, and emerging growth company—to better reflect the size and makeup of public companies in today’s environment.
Regulation of Proxy Advisors
On December 11, 2025, the White House issued an executive order calling on various federal agencies, including the SEC, to provide more regulatory oversight of proxy advisory firms.
Atkins has also indicated his interest in moving forward with a regulatory proposal regarding these firms. Some members of Congress also want to advance legislation to ensure that the SEC has ample authority to regulate these firms and their business practices.
It is unclear whether the SEC or Congress will move first on this issue, but 2026 is definitely going to be a year in which these firms face increasing scrutiny and more oversight of their business models and practices.
Shareholder Proposal Modernization
The SEC Regulatory Agenda also states that the agency intends to propose a rule to modernize its Rule 14a-8 to reduce compliance burdens for companies and update shareholder proposal rules to reflect the current environment.
The Division of Corporation Finance also issued a statement in November 2025 announcing that, for the 2026 proxy season, the SEC staff would no longer respond to no-action requests on shareholder proposals.
NIRI 13F Petition for Rulemaking
NIRI continues to pursue the Petition for Rulemaking it filed in 2024 to reduce the Form 13F filing deadline from 45 calendar days to five business days.
A Petition for Rulemaking is a public process used to recommend a rule change to the SEC. The SEC staff has created a comment letter file, and all of the more than 25 comments filed so far have been positive.
The SEC comment process on a Petition for Rulemaking is open-ended with no specific deadline. It would help NIRI’s advocacy efforts if more public companies would submit letters of support. Any company interested in doing so should feel free to contact me at my email address below.
The NIRI Board of Directors met with the SEC staff last fall about this petition and several other meetings have been held to build support for the SEC moving forward on this issue.
Public Company Advisory Committee Legislation
U.S. Representatives Frank Lucas (R-OK) and Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) have re-introduced legislation advocated by NIRI and other business groups to establish a Public Company Advisory Committee at the SEC.
The Lucas-Pettersen legislation, H.R. 6967, is modeled after the Investor Advisory Committee, which was established by the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010.
The SEC uses advisory committees as an institutional mechanism to seek and obtain input from its stakeholders on a range of regulatory and policy issues. Over the years, the agency has created several of these internal committees for asset managers, large investors, fixed-income market participants, and small businesses.
Public companies are one of the only regulated parties at the SEC without access to an advisory committee. Clearly, the SEC Commissioners and staff would benefit from more issuer input on issues of common interest.
This NIRI initiative is starting to move in Congress. On January 22, 2026, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services approved H.R. 6967, with one minor amendment, by a rare bipartisan vote of 39-15. The bill now heads to the House floor, where its congressional sponsors expect it to pass.
We will have much more to report on this legislation as it advances further in Congress this year.
Conclusion
We believe 2026 will be a very productive and successful advocacy year for NIRI and the IR community.
The NIRI advocacy program is also growing, led by the NIRI Board of Directors Advocacy Committee and with ongoing input from the NIRI membership.
We do hope to see many members at the NIRI Legislative and Advocacy Fly-In this year, scheduled for September 30, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
Niels Holch leads the NIRI advocacy program.