The Securities and Exchange Commission will discuss the market’s concerns and discomforts involving secondary market disclosure at an annual conference March 10.
The SEC announced late Thursday that it will host the conference entitled, “Spotlight on Transparency: A Discussion of Secondary Market Municipal Securities Disclosure Practices." This is the second such SEC municipal disclosure conference, the first having been held in December 2018.
The announcement comes as the municipal market awaits an SEC legal bulletin that is expected to clarify the commission's views on the application of the antifraud laws in secondary disclosure. Some issuers have said that their bond lawyers have been advising them that the legal standards may be different for disclosures on EMMA than for those made elsewhere, and SEC staff are expected to provide guidance that could be available any day.
SEC Chairman Jay Clayton and Commissioners Hester Peirce, Elad Roisman, Allison Herren Lee and staff from the Office of Municipal Securities will be at the conference. Commissioner Robert Jackson will not be in attendance, having finished his term earlier this month.
Clayton and OMS Director Rebecca Olsen will start the conference with opening remarks followed by a panel discussing voluntary disclosure practices in the secondary market. The conference will also discuss buy-side perspectives, Rule 15c2-12 amendments and other secondary market disclosure topics.
At the previous municipal securities disclosure conference in December 2018, Clayton indicated he may be interested in taking regulatory action to improve disclosure.
"To be clear: I believe that there are potential steps that the SEC and the MSRB can take—that would be wholly consistent with the words and spirit of the Tower Amendment—to improve transparency around the age and type of financial information," Clayton said in his remarks in 2018.
Clayton also said at that time he asked SEC staff to work with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board to see if its EMMA system — an online source for municipal securities data and disclosure documents — could yield greater transparency regarding issuer financial information.
The MSRB proposed a submission calculator in November 2019 that would more prominently display the timeliness of issuers’ annual financial disclosures on EMMA.
The conference will start at 9:30 a.m. and run until 4 p.m. with doors open at 8:30 a.m. It will be held at SEC headquarters at 100 F Street NE in Washington.
