The Securities and Exchange Commission's push to let public companies report financial results twice a year instead of four times has run into a wall of resistance from the investment community, with three of the industry's most influential groups warning the change would strip investors and their advisors of the timely data they rely on to make sound decisions.
The proposal, which would create a new Form 10-S allowing companies to file semiannually rather than on the current Form 10-Q quarterly schedule, is a centerpiece of SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins's deregulatory agenda.
Atkins has framed the effort as part of a broader campaign, which he has publicly dubbed "Make IPOs Great Again," aimed at making public-company status less burdensome so more firms choose to list – and stay listed – in the U.S.
But the response from money managers, financial planners and everyday investors alike suggests the agency may have miscalculated how deeply embedded quarterly reporting is in the ecosystem of American capital markets.
The SEC's 60-day comment period on the proposal, formally designated File No. S7-2026-15, closed July 6. A tracker built by Tzachi Zach, an accounting professor at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, shows 11,997 individually classified comment letters as of a July 9 snapshot, with roughly 97% opposing the proposal and only a small share expressing conditional or outright support. That individually classified count sits on top of a separate tally of nearly 60,000 form-letter and campaign submitters logged by the SEC across ten template types, all opposed.
That lopsided tally stands in sharp contrast to the SEC's last attempt to gauge sentiment on this question. When the agency sought feedback on reporting frequency in 2018, only 43% of respondents opposed a shift away from quarterly filings, according to Sarah McVay, an accounting professor at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. McVay told CFO Dive she was surprised by the scale of opposition this time around, even though she personally expects the SEC to proceed with the rule regardless.
Industry veterans see the numbers as unusually significant. Daniel Brinks, a forensic accounting partner at StoneTurn who previously worked as a senior SEC enforcement accountant, said the one-sidedness of the comment file raises the odds of a legal challenge if the commission finalizes the rule as written.
The comment letter from the Investment Adviser Association, who says its members collectively manage more than $57 trillion in client assets, stopped short of outright rejection but raised a lengthy list of concerns for the commission to weigh. The group argued that less frequent reporting would deprive fiduciary investment advisers of the standardized, comparable information they need to act in clients' best interests, and could disproportionately hurt smaller and mid-sized advisory firms that lack the resources or private information channels available to larger competitors.
The IAA also pushed back on the SEC's suggestion that quarterly filings mainly serve short-term traders. Long-term investors and their advisers still need regular disclosures to monitor leverage, liquidity, management performance and emerging risk, the group argued, and a "set-it-and-forget-it" approach to long-term investing is a misreading of how fiduciaries actually operate.
Rather than cutting the reporting cadence, the IAA recommended the SEC instead streamline the content required in existing 10-Q filings – an alternative that SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce also pointed to in a statement regarding the proposal.
The letter from CFP Board, which oversees certification standards for financial planners, said moving away from mandatory quarterly reporting could put retail investors at a disadvantage, push the market toward less standardized private data sources, and make it harder for investors and planners to compare companies and track trends across industries.
"Quarterly reporting gives retail investors and the financial professionals who serve them a reliable baseline of timely, comparable information," said Erin Koeppel, managing director of government relations and public policy counsel at CFP Board, who added that reducing the cadence would widen information gaps, weaken transparency and make fraud harder to detect.
In a survey of 2,500 CFA charterholders working as analysts and portfolio managers, 62% opposed replacing quarterly filings with semiannual ones, and 63% agreed the benefits of quarterly reporting outweigh its costs. Perhaps more telling, roughly 70% of respondents opposed giving companies flexibility to choose their own reporting schedule, and only 32% expect companies would keep filing quarterly voluntarily if the requirement became optional.
Among the SEC's comment file are informal submissions from individual investors, along with pointed letters from corporate veterans. David Bolling Wells, a former CFO of Netflix, acknowledged there are legitimate arguments for a six-month reporting cycle but still urged the SEC to preserve the current model, calling quarterly reporting a foundational element of "democratic capital markets".
Groups representing retail traders on platforms like Reddit have also weighed in, framing quarterly disclosure as one of the few tools leveling the playing field between individual and institutional investors.
"Institutional investors have expert networks, channel checks, alternative data, satellite imagery of retailer parking lots, credit card panel data, and direct management access through conferences and one-on-one meetings that cost more than most of our portfolios," reads a dissenting letter from Reddit's WallStreetBets community issued in May. "We have the 10-Q."
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