Topic
Rule 14a-8 shareholder proposals, ballot access, and exclusion disputes between issuers and proponents.
A September 16 proposal would rescind Rule 14a-8 and widen the discretion companies hold over proxies already returned to them, completing a withdrawal the SEC's staff started nearly a year ago.
Reality
Commissioner Mark Uyeda says the legal authority for a rule the SEC has run for eight decades was lacking, and his own statement allows that removing it could widen what shareholders may put to a vote.
Reality
Frederick Alexander is telling executives and investors to write a private substitute for the shareholder proposal rule now, while the federal version still exists to trade against.
Reality
The Commission would let companies elect semiannual filing on a newly created Form 10-S. The work that election creates for disclosure controls and guidance practice starts long before the rules take effect.
Reality
Meta will pay up to $17.1 billion to settle youth-safety claims from 47 states and thousands of families, five years after a content governance proposal carried the company's independent holders and lost on Mark Zuckerberg's ballot.
Reality
Timothy Smith of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility answers the SEC chair's criticism of high-volume filers with vote tallies, which measure investor support rather than the governance changes companies actually made.
Reality
Corp Fin will no longer answer any Rule 14a-8 no-action request, so the judgment about whether an exclusion holds sits with the company that makes it, and the next reader of that judgment is a judge.
Reality
ISS STOXX counts governance proposals up 7 percent on US ballots while environmental and social filings kept falling, which leaves engagement plans written to defend a sustainability record answering a questioner who has already moved on.
Reality
D.F. King puts 2026 filings down nearly 25%. Conservative exclusion calls under the SEC's revised no-action process pushed more proposals onto ballots than expected, and average support did not fall.
Reality
The SEC's Division of Corporation Finance has stopped answering companies on Rule 14a-8, which leaves the 80-day exclusion notice as the only filing in the process and the opinion inside it entirely the company's own.
Reality
Staff will not say whether a company's reason for dropping a shareholder proposal is any good until at least September 30, 2026. The paperwork survives; the referee does not.
Reality