Happy Birthday Regulation CF (shame about the compliance failures)

So, one year ago today, Regulation CF went into effect. Small companies can make offerings up to $1 million (recently increased to $1.07 million) and roughly 325 companies have made Reg CF offerings so far. Roughly 80 companies have filed Form C-U to notify the SEC of the conclusion of their offering (they can also use Form C-U to report progress of the deal, so the raw numbers need refining). Another 50 or so companies have taken advantage of the fact that the SEC tells us that multiple closings are permitted once a company reaches its target offering amount, and so have received funds but have ongoing offerings.

We’re talking about modest success so far. Companies are finding it takes a while to raise the funds they are seeking and many offerings are still in progress, so overall success rates are going to go up in time. And several companies have had million-dollar raises.

The less-encouraging story in in the area of compliance. By our calculation, by May 1 perhaps 100 companies should have filed annual reports under Form C-AR (all the companies which had filed C-Us by that date and all companies which had sold some securities but not finished their raise). Again by our calculations, only two-thirds of the companies that should have filed did so. Not too impressive.

And that’s just measuring whether those companies filed, not looking at the content of their filings. We’ve been reviewing all the filings made on Form C, and evaluating their compliance with the disclosure requirement of Rule 201. Later this summer we’ll publish more detailed findings. But in the meantime, we are sad to report that compliance is not particularly good. It seems to be improving, which is the good news. But there are a number of areas where the disclosure requested by the SEC is not being made:

•          Only one in four companies is providing a discussion of the company’s financial performance since the end of the financial statements included in the Form C, which can be as old as sixteen months.
•           Four out of five companies include no discussion at all about how the proceeds of the offering will affect their liquidity and how long the proceeds will last.
•           One quarter of the companies filing don’t include a description of all the securities they have issued.

The list goes on. I don’t think disclosure failure is an insurmountable problem; as discussed above there does seem to be some improvement. However, at a time when we are looking for more flexibility from the SEC, “please change the rules because we aren’t complying with the ones currently in effect” is not generally a winning argument. The answer to the issue of disclosure deficiency is clearly one is clearly education; the biggest areas of deficiency are where the SEC’s requirements may not be totally clear to issuers, and it’s an area where the intermediaries (funding platforms and brokers) can help. Filing deficiency may be a harder issue to address; often filing requirement only kick in when the intermediary is not longer involved.

But if we don’t solve both problems, as an industry it will be harder to get the regulatory flexibility we still need.