DealLawyers.com Blog

On Friday, the SEC issued this 224-page proposing release that would make significant changes to the rules governing the financial information that public companies must provide for significant acquisitions and divestitures. Here’s the SEC’s press release – and we’ll be posting memos in our “Accounting” Practice Area.

The “fact sheet” that the SEC included with its press release summarizes the changes that it proposes to make. As this excerpt indicates, they are fairly extensive:

The proposed changes would, among other things:

– update the significance tests under these rules by revising the investment test and the income test, expanding the use of pro forma financial information in measuring significance, and conforming the significance threshold and tests for a disposed business;
– require the financial statements of the acquired business to cover up to the two most recent fiscal years rather than up to the three most recent fiscal years;
– permit disclosure of financial statements that omit certain expenses for certain acquisitions of a component of an entity;
– clarify when financial statements and pro forma financial information are required;
– permit the use in certain circumstances of, or reconciliation to, International Financial Reporting Standards as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board;
– no longer require separate acquired business financial statements once the business has been included in the registrant’s post-acquisition financial statements for a complete fiscal year;

The changes would also impact financial statements required under Rule 3-14 of Regulation S-X (which deals with acquisitions of real estate operations), amend existing pro forma requirements to improve the content and relevance of required pro forma financial information, and make corresponding changes in the rules applicable to smaller reporting companies under Article 8 of Regulation S-X.

Interestingly, while Commissioner Jackson voted in favor of moving forward with the rule proposal, he also issued a statement in which he expressed concern that the proposals seem to proceed from the assumption that mergers and acquisitions are “an unalloyed good.” He expressed some skepticism about that, contending that the proposals ignore “decades of data showing that not all acquisitions make sense for investors.”

Ultimately, Jackson urged investors “to help us engage more carefully and critically with longstanding evidence that corporate insiders use mergers as a means to advance their private interests over the long-term interests of investors.”

For more detail on the rule proposals, check out this blog from Cooley’s Cydney Posner.

– John Jenkins