The US Securities and Exchange Commission may be floating a proposal to make quarterly reporting optional. Under this proposal, US-listed companies will only be required to report just twice a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.
The proposal will be open for public comments and following which the SEC will make a decision.
US-listed companies have been reporting quarterly for half a century.
The intention to drop this long-held requirement is to reduce time-consuming work required and possibly help boost the number of publicly-traded companies in the US, even though it is already the world's largest stock market by far.
US President Donald Trump reportedly supports this idea.
According to the WSJ, listed European companies are no longer obliged to report quarterly since 2013. UK followed a year later.
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Closer to home, SGX followed suit in 2020 but with caveats: companies are still to report quarterly if they have a modified audit opinion on their latest financial statements; their auditors have highlighted a material uncertainty relating to going concern based on their latest financial statements; and/or SGX has regulatory concerns about them.
