In recent years, firms have been paying more attention to the issue of green development and sustainability, so that the concept of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) is gradually central to firms consideration, especially when involved in emissions. This article reviews the key regulatory models of ESG disclosure obligations for comparative analysis, namely through the lenses of the European Union's ("EU") Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed climate-related disclosure rules, and Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) mandatory implementation in the United Kingdom. Moreover, this article does not seek to analyze what their interpretive effect would be when reading California's future SB253 and SB261. The findings in this study suggest that the CSRD of the EU is extensive and binding, with robust requirements of assurance, followed by the US, whose approach is still fragmented, considering no federal legislation has been enacted, making compliance almost voluntary. The U.K. approach is obligatory in nature but flexible by blending soft-law elements. The article concludes that legal traditions and regulatory philosophies play a significant role in the formation of ESG disclosure systems, and thereby harmonization will require balancing the extent to which laws are legally enforced with where they are best adapted within the markets, both of which state legislatures can learn from under these Acts.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the life of Walter Schuetze (1932–2017) and his contributions to the accounting profession. He was a public accountant, a founding member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the Chief Accountant for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a corporate board member, and an advocate for accounting reform. In 2008, he was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame. This paper shows how Walter Schuetze has left a quiet but impactful legacy with lessons learned that still have applicability to the accounting profession today.

In 2023, 46% of the S&P 500 companies provided personal use of corporate aircraft to their chief executive officers, and 31% provided this perk to other named executive officers. This type of executive compensation has notoriously garnered much attention from the media, given the large amount of investor money spent on personal travel and the environmental impacts of flying private. In addition, the line between personal travel and business travel is often blurred, and the media has tracked flight paths of corporate aircraft to speculate that some flights may be incorrectly categorized as business trips when the jets land and take off from resort destinations where an executive may have a second home. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), separate government agencies with distinct focuses, both seek to promote fairness in the United States through disclosures and taxation. The SEC has often scrutinized executive perquisites and aims to provide investors with accurate disclosures so they can make informed investment decisions. The IRS recently reported that it plans to audit corporate aircraft reporting at large companies and subsequently audit high-net-worth individuals who may receive this perk from large companies. ESG concerns—an especially controversial topic today—have also shaped how people view private jet travel, with reports estimating that private jets emit five to fourteen times more pollution per passenger than commercial flights. Additionally, emissions attributable to the wealthy, those who frequently fly private, account for more climate change effects than those of low-income earners.

The Intersection of Cryptocurrency and Securities Law has been discussed in various legal contexts in the present scenario. The rise of cryptocurrencies has put forth fresh challenges for investors as well as regulators and there is a need for clear direction on how to interpret the transactions that include digital currencies. The advent of crypto exchanges has formed an entire ecosystem of services and participants, who are looking to provide liquidity, exploit price differences for profit, and support the investments. The focus of the study is to investigate the legal and regulatory steps taken to include cryptocurrencies within securities law. The paper will delve into the distinctive attributes of cryptocurrencies and analyse the different regulations in which they can be classified as securities. Moreover, it will inspect the fluctuating regulatory strategies adopted by various countries and entities, such as the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (SIC), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and others.

Climate change is the existential issue of our age. Its challenges are massive, its science is ever‐developing and most now agree that its demands are immediate. How society deals with the immensity and immediacy of the challenge in the face of incomplete, immature, and sometimes inconclusive data is a question playing out now in our capital markets. Bending to demand from green investors and environmental activists, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed new rules on March 21, 2022, “to enhance and standardize climate‐related disclosures” to better inform investors' decision‐making. How should reporting companies, already obligated to report on material risks to their businesses, “enhance and standardize” climate‐related disclosure when the data are ambiguous or in conflict? This article proposes one possible and currently available solution: use satellite‐based data. By requiring the use of available satellite data, regulators can protect investors from being misled by cherry‐picked emissions data. We begin with a case for standardization and a brief history of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting and metrics, both in the United States and internationally, as well as SEC efforts regarding climate change disclosures. We then explore the precedent for satellite use and space‐based technology in monitoring and regulatory compliance and argue that satellite and space data can be instrumental to help investors make more informed investment decisions based on reporting companies' true environmental impact.

International oil and gas companies listed in New York must publish the information of oil and gas reserves under the SEC (United States Securities and Exchange Commission) standards every year. For greatly improving the SEC reserve, the SEC reserve value and the SEC reserve substitution rate, in this article not only the SEC reserve equations have been determined but also the SEC reserve value models have been established. The SEC reserve value models have been verified as correct. Based on these models, the multivariate function calculus method, the multivariate function limit method and the function recurrence method have been adopted to research parameter sensitivity differences rules, parameter adjustment directions, parameter adjustment degrees and SEC reserve parameter linkage adjustment rules. The research is significant, because there are great differences between SEC standards and China’s in reserve management mode, reserve estimation method system and financial management system. It is just these differences that cause the frequent adjustment of SEC reserve parameters during the process of SEC reserve submissions each year. As a result, this article reaches some conclusions. Above all, the article has clarified the parameter quantitative conditions that lead to the sensitivity between the SEC reserve and the initial production to begin stronger and weaker than the sensitivity between the SEC reserve and the price in production exponential, hyperbolic and harmonic decline types. Furthermore, the article has clarified the parameter quantitative conditions that lead to the sensitivity between the SEC reserve value and the initial production to begin stronger and weaker than the sensitivity between the SEC reserve value and the price in common production exponential decline types. Moreover, the article has clarified reserve parameter linkage adjustment rules and found the most significant parameter whose least adjustment will cause the largest reserve increase. In addition, the function calculus method adopted to disclose reserve parameter sensitivity rules will expand the parameter sensitivity analysis method that took the previous statistical mapping method as the main analysis method.

Cyber-crime is an increasingly common risk for organizations that collect and maintain vast troves of data. There is extensive literature that explores the causes of cyber-crime, but relatively little work that aims to predict future incidents. In 2011, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provided guidelines for how publicly traded companies should convey these risks to potential investors. The SEC and other regulatory agencies are exploring how to leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science tools to improve their regulatory efforts. This paper explores the potential to use machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyze firms’ mandatory risk disclosure statements, and predict which firms are at the greatest risk of suffering cyber-security incidents. More broadly, this study highlights the potential for using legally mandated disclosures to bolster regulatory efforts, particularly in the context of prediction policy problems.

Disgorgement of ill-gotten gain, similar to an unjust enrichment claim, is a common remedy in United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement. In June 2017, the Supreme Court held in Kokesh v. SEC that disgorgement is a penalty. As such, the statute of limitations in section 28 U.S.C. § 2462 for any “fine, penalty, or forfeiture” bars the SEC from seeking disgorgement for any violation committed more than five years before suit. The Kokesh decision has reverberated through federal enforcement. Most directly, it bars SEC disgorgement claims for long-running frauds, costing the Agency $1.1 billion to date. As is typical for Supreme Court decisions, Kokesh also raised more questions than it answered. If disgorgement is a penalty, then most other enforcement remedies are also penalties and are thus time limited to five years. Moreover, disgorgement in SEC civil actions is not expressly authorized in any statute. If disgorgement is a penalty, then perhaps the SEC cannot seek disgorgement in court actions at all. More than two years after the Kokesh decision, its impact remains uncertain. Using a unique dataset of over eight thousand SEC enforcement actions filed between 2010 and 2018, this Article unravels the impacts of Kokesh. Depending on how broadly lower courts interpret Kokesh, anywhere between twenty and eighty percent of SEC disgorgement is at risk. At the same time, and contrary to claims advanced by SEC leadership, Kokesh does not substantially undermine the Agency’s abilities to compensate investors or to deter misconduct, but it will certainly change the incentives at work during settlement negotiations. However Kokesh is interpreted, one group of defendants—individuals running long-standing frauds targeting small-scale investors—clearly benefits. Many of them will be able to fleece ordinary people of their nest eggs and then keep the money they stole. Even if such defendants cannot be deterred, the result is corrosive because it offends basic notions of fairness and thus undermines the rule of law.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the association between revenue-based earnings management in the periods immediately before and after firms’ initial public offerings (IPOs) and regulatory scrutiny by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during review of IPO firms’ registration statements.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses conditional discretionary revenues (Stubben, 2010) as its measure of earnings management, and revenue recognition comments delivered by the SEC as its measure of regulatory scrutiny. The authors use ordinary least squares regression (OLS) models, as well as a supplemental count model, to assess the association between conditional discretionary revenues and revenue recognition comments delivered by the SEC.FindingsThis study finds evidence of a positive association between earnings management measures in the pre-IPO period and the number of revenue recognition comments received by those firms during the SEC’s review. Furthermore, this study provides evidence that greater numbers of comments are associated with declining earnings management measures in the post-IPO period. However, the evidence suggests that these associations apply only to income-decreasing earnings management.Originality/valueThis paper extends the IPO earnings management literature by using conditional discretionary revenues as the measure of earnings management, and contributes to a nascent research stream in the accounting literature by investigating the SEC’s comment letter process and its association with, and impact upon, earnings management in the IPO process.

Multivariate GARCH analysis of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and American International Group: Did the short-selling ban reduce systemic return-risk?

We use United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) comment letters and accounting restatements to investigate the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance (DCF) financial reporting oversight procedures. We investigate how DCF compares with “other monitors” in identifying disclosures requiring restatement and how these restatements differ. Our tests focus on DCF as a whole and on the individual industry offices that comprise the DCF. We conclude that, while there are significant variations across DCF offices in the prompting of restatements, company variables used by the SEC to select firms for review appear consistent with SOX section 408 criteria. We also find the oversight process focuses on companies with weaker “other monitors,” i.e. audit firms. Our results provide evidence for the debate on whether or not an SEC type review and comment letter monitoring process could serve as the model for achieving the oversight for IFRS enforcement that is critical to international capital markets.

Stock Market Reaction to Elimination of the Reconciliation from IFRS to U.S. GAAP in the USA

Summary The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on 29 December 2008, adopted new rules for disclosing oil and gas reserves. The definitions contained within these rules are broadly consistent with the SPE Petroleum Resources Management System (PRMS); the definitions in the previous rules differed from PRMS in a number of specific instances (SPE 2007). A notable difference in the new rules is inclusion of more nontraditional resources as potential oil and gas reserves rather than as mining reserves. With new disclosure rules, new questions arise about the manner in which reserves in nontraditional resources are to be reported.

Summary Modernized United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules for reporting oil and gas reserves are now broadly consistent with the SPE definitions and generally reflect public requests for specific changes in the previous rules. Disclosure requirements based on the revised definitions feature use of annual average prices; wider use of reliable technologies; broader recognition of nontraditional resources, including those from oil sands, shales, and coal; optional disclosure of probable and possible reserves; and replacement of the "certainty" criterion for some reserves by a "reasonably certain" criterion. Official clarification of some of the new terms may be forthcoming; here, I provide my opinion of their intent.

The role of accounting information in security exchange delisting

Oil and gas reserve value disclosures and bid-ask spreads