Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Paul Atkins has indicated that the commission is very close to issuing a proposal to seek public comment on allowing public companies to provide semi-annual reports.
This is part of his goal to “make IPOs great again,” and is in response to President Trump’s personal recommendation in September 2025 that the SEC revise the reporting rules so that public companies would not be required to report on a quarterly basis.
Speaking at the Economic Club of Washington on April 21, 2026, which marks his one-year anniversary as head of the SEC, Atkins said that there has been debate and change in the frequency of corporate reporting.
“We haven’t had quarterly reporting for that long,” Atkins said, explaining that in 1934, the New York Stock Exchange required annual reports. In 1955 the SEC changed it to semi-annual report, then it was changed to quarterly reporting in 1972, he said. “And interestingly enough, the U.K. went along with us. But then in 2014 they went back to semi-annual, although they allowed companies who want to do quarterly to continue.”
Moreover, today foreign companies that are listed on major exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ report semi-annually, he said.
“So why not have a discussion about this now at this time, and so we have a proposal ready to go,” Atkins said. “It’s with OIRA right now,” said Atkins who himself is agnostic about the frequency of reporting.
OIRA is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs within the Office of Management and Budget. OIRA, among other things, reviews drafts of proposed and final regulations.
Atkins noted that there are different views in the marketplace.
On the one hand, he said biotech companies that are waiting for approval from the Food and Drug Administration, for example, and do not have much change in their operations or performance, say that quarterly reporting creates unnecessary costs.
On the other hand, Atkins said that others, including a chief executive officer of a very large trading firm, advocate for monthly reporting because he gets monthly reports.
“I don’t think that many people would enjoy that. And I said back then, ‘well, I’m sure you get daily reports, too, for your positions at the end of the day. I doubt you want that,'” Atkins said. “So, I think it should really depend. I’m agnostic on this whole issue, but I think for companies to try to seek the best cost of capital, it will depend, I believe, on what investors” want.
In the President’s view meanwhile, the SEC ought to make the changes.
“This will save money, and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies. Did you ever hear the statement that, ‘China has a 50 to 100 year view on management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!” President Trump wrote in Truth Social last year.
Other Near-Term Rulemaking Projects
Atkins believes that burdensome regulations have made companies hesitant to go public.
As he has often said, there were more than 7,800 companies listed on U.S. exchanges in 1994, but the number had fallen by roughly 40% in 2025—”a striking convergence with the nearly 40 percent of Americans who today have no exposure to U.S. equities. No stake in the companies that they help to build; little share in the wealth that they help to create.”
“So, as I have indicated on several occasions, we are working to reverse the precipitous decline in public companies,” Atkins said. “A central objective for this goal is to rationalize disclosure requirements by delivering the minimum dose of regulation, again with materiality as our north star.”
In addition to semiannual reporting, Atkins said that, as part of efforts to execute his “make IPO great again” agenda, he has asked the staff in the near term to evaluate the following:
- adopting a regulatory initial public offering (IPO) “on-ramp” that supplements the concept that Congress designed in the JOBS Act;
- expanding the existing accommodations that are currently available only for emerging and smaller companies to more businesses; and
- providing nearly all public companies with an easier path to “shelf registration,” which allows them to access the public markets quickly and when market conditions are ideal.
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