SEC Must Move Corporate Political Spending Into the Light
By Rachel Curley, Public Citizen
It’s clear that Americans want transparency when it comes to how companies spend in politics.
The next administration and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) must address secret corporate political spending because it poses a great threat to democracy and investor confidence, says a new report by Public Citizen. The report, highlighting the historic campaign for an SEC rule requiring publicly held corporations to disclose their political spending, comes in advance of a Sept. 20 event on the state of corporate disclosure and as Public Citizen and its partners in the Corporate Reform Coalition (CRC) review and plan ahead for a new administration and new SEC priorities.
The Sept. 20 event is organized by Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, Americans for Financial Reform, Ceres the Financial Accountability & Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition, the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR), Patriotic Millionaires and SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, and hosted by the Center for American Progress. It will explore the SEC’s recent “Disclosure Effectiveness” review, which is evaluating corporate disclosure requirements, and the role of environmental, social and governance disclosures in promoting a sustainable economy.
The report details how a five-year campaign has driven 1.2 million comments to the SEC in support of a disclosure rule – the most in the agency’s history. The campaign also has garnered more than 500 stories in local and national press, and brought together powerful champions on Capitol Hill who are working to ensure that an SEC rulemaking on disclosure is not obstructed by congressional Republicans’ insertion of a harmful policy rider into the appropriations process that would stop the SEC from finalizing the rule. In addition, another 20,000 comments supporting political spending disclosure have come into the agency as comments to its “Disclosure Effectiveness” review process and to the agency’s Regulation S-K concept release, which solicited comments on proposed changes to corporate financial statement requirements.
The campaign began in response to the disastrous 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which opened the floodgates for corporations to spend unlimited and undisclosed amounts to influence American politics. In 2011, a bipartisan committee of leading corporate and securities law professors filed the first petition requesting a rulemaking at the SEC requiring all public companies to disclose their political expenditures. In response, the agency began a rulemaking, then halted it.
In this election cycle, secret outside spending is the highest it has ever been, clocking in at a whopping $660 million. Americans know that corporate influences lurk behind most campaign ads. Polls show they remain frustrated by the lack of transparency around corporate political spending.
Disclosure is material to investors as they consider the risk of their investment and important to the American voters who want to know who is bankrolling their elections. The SEC needs to take a stand and move forward with this rulemaking.