As part of his goal to “make IPOs great again,” Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Paul Atkins on September 17, 2025, thanked President Trump for his idea of semiannual reporting by public companies and indicated that the staff is working on a proposal.
This comes as President Trump on September 15 urged the SEC to revise the reporting rules so that public companies would not need to report on a quarterly basis.
“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.
Atkins briefly addressed the concept of semiannual reporting during an open SEC meeting on September 17, which was held to vote on initial public offering (IPO) and mandatory arbitration clauses. He described these measures as “among the first steps of my goal” to reinvigorate IPO activity.
The bigger project, Atkins said, is intended to make becoming a public company more attractive by eliminating compliance requirements that do not provide meaningful investor protections, minimizing regulatory uncertainty, and reducing legal complexities in the SEC’s rulebook.
“The next steps in this project include enhancing accommodations for newly public and smaller companies, expanding post-IPO companies’ ability to easily access the public markets to raise additional capital, simplifying disclosure requirements for executive compensation and other topics to focus on material information, and modernizing the shareholder proposal process,” Atkins explained. “I thank President Trump for his idea of semiannual reporting by public companies. The staff is currently preparing recommendations for each of these topics, and I eagerly await the commission’s proposal for each recommendation.”
First Effort Fizzles
This is not the first time that the SEC has studied the timing, nature, and content of financial reporting.
During his first term, Trump in August 2018 wrote a tweet asking the SEC to consider the six-month reporting system to replace the three-month quarterly and annual filing requirements that U.S. public companies have followed since 1970.
Trump at the time made the request after a business executive told him that quarterly reporting is too burdensome. Some critics of the current system also argue that quarterly reporting promotes a short-term mindset among corporate executives who are driven to meet earnings expectations every three months.
At the time, SEC Chair Jay Clayton initiated a study first by issuing a preliminary rulemaking document asking for feedback, then following up with a roundtable. After that, he kept delaying issuing a proposal, and there was no further regulatory movement.
Then Gary Gensler, President Biden’s appointee to lead the SEC, quietly dropped the rulemaking in 2021 shortly after he took office.
In comment letters in response to the preliminary rulemaking, businesses stated a clear preference for less frequent reporting. Moreover, in the spring of 2018, eight business organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), and the National Venture Capital Association, recommended reducing the frequency of regulatory filings as one of several policy initiatives to help more companies go and stay public. Business groups often say the decline in the number of IPOs compared to the 1990s is partly a result of unnecessary regulation.
But large investor groups said the SEC should maintain the current quarterly reporting system because it has served them well for decades: Frequent reports instill financial reporting discipline and provide transparency to investors.
The CFA Institute wrote that there has been a debate around the world over whether switching from quarterly to semiannual reporting would save companies time and money. In the United Kingdom, companies were required to provide quarterly reports in 2007, but the requirement was dropped in 2014, allowing companies to provide semiannual reports. Research on the U.K. experience showed that quarterly reporting did not change the time horizon management considered when making long-term investment decisions.
By contrast, an increasing number of companies published more qualitative than quantitative quarterly reports and gave managerial guidance about future company earnings or sales. At the same time, the research found that there was an increase in analyst coverage of public companies and an improvement in the accuracy of analyst forecasts of company earnings, the group said.
The professional investor group said it has long believed that when companies focus on long-term strategy, they are looking at three to five years or longer, not six months.
“Accordingly, extending the reporting period from three to six months has little impact,” the group said. “We believe that a better approach to deterring short-termism would be to focus on companies’ incentive structures. Companies interested in encouraging a long-term view should consider changing the performance periods in their incentive plans from three-year to five-year performance periods.”
Could This Time Around Be Different?
While the project fizzled during the first round, the second round might be different.
Today, the White House during the second Trump presidency has been much more involved in each regulatory agency’s rules. Cabinet members or agency heads have been much quicker to act to deliver whatever the President has been seeking, from immigration to tariffs even if his actions have been legally challenged.
Only two days ago, it was not clear whether the next step for semiannual reporting would be a proposal.
In response to a question by Thomson Reuters at the sidelines of a conference hosted by the AICPA on September 15 about the next step, SEC Chief Accountant Kurt Hohl said that it’s “too early” to comment.
He added that the commission in the past didn’t make any changes. But “times have changed. I think this commission’s kind of focused on how to basically make things simpler for investors, less focused on risk and to basically see what we can do to look at the financial markets and make them more consumable, if you will.”
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