Con JOBS

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

Bipartisanship in Washington is back from the dead, at least for the moment, but its reappearance illustrates what happens when the two major parties find common ground: Corporate skullduggery gets a boost under the guise of helping workers.

That’s the story of the bill with the deliberately misleading acronym -- the JOBS Act -- which emerged from the cauldrons of the financial deregulation crowd and has now been embraced not only by Republicans but also by the Obama Administration and many Congressional Democrats. An effort by Senate Democrats to mitigate the riskiest features of the bill has failed, and now the legislation seems headed for final passage.

More formally known as the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, the bill is based on the dubious premise that newer companies are having difficulty raising capital and that weakening Securities and Exchange Commission rules -- including those contained in the Sarbanes-Oxley law enacted in the wake of the Enron and other accounting scandals of the early 2000s -- would allow more start-ups to go public, expand their business and create jobs. The outbreaks of financial fraud in recent years have apparently done nothing to shake the belief that less regulated markets can work miracles.

For many, that notion may be more of a fig leaf than an article of faith. One clear sign that the JOBS Act is trying to pull a fast one is that the "emerging growth companies" targeted for regulatory relief are defined in the bill as those with up to $1 billion in annual revenue. This is just the latest example of an effort purportedly designed to help small business that really serves much larger corporate entities. (What proponents on the JOBS Act don't mention is that the SEC already has exemptions from some of its rules for companies that can somewhat more legitimately be called small -- those with less than $75 million in sales.)

Critics ranging from the AARP to state securities regulators have focused on provisions of the JOBS bill that would allow start-up companies to solicit investors on the web, warning that this will pave the way for more scams.

I want to zero in on another issue, which is central to the mission of the Dirt Diggers Digest: disclosure. In the name of streamlining the rules for the so-called emerging growth companies, the JOBS Act would erode some of the key transparency provisions of the securities laws.

This is fitting, given that the original sponsor of the bill, Rep. Stephen Fincher of Tennessee (photo), has been embroiled in scandals involving gaps in his personal financial disclosure and last year was named one of the "most corrupt" members of Congress by the watchdog group CREW.

The first problem with the JOBS bill is that it would allow firms planning initial stock offerings to issue informal marketing documents and distribute potentially biased analyst reports well before they have to issue formal prospectuses with thorough and candid descriptions of their financial and operating condition. In other words, the bill would postpone real disclosure until after the company has used a bogus form of disclosure to generate a quite possibly misleading image of itself.

When the company does have to file with the SEC, it would have to provide only two years of audited financial statements rather than three and would be exempt from reporting requirements such as the disclosure of data on the ratio of CEO compensation to worker compensation mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act. It would also be exempt from having to give shareholders an opportunity to vote on executive pay practices.

What's worse, the JOBS bill also seems to opening the door to a broader erosion of disclosure provisions for all publicly traded companies. The bill would order the SEC to conduct a review of the Commission's Regulation S-K to determine how it might be streamlined for "emerging growth" companies.

Yet it also calls for the SEC to "comprehensively analyze the current registration requirements" of the regulation, which could mean a weakening of the rules for all companies, no matter what their size. Regulation S-K is the broad set of rules determining what public companies have to include in their public filings on issues ranging from financial results to executive compensation and legal proceedings.

It is bad enough that the JOBS bill exploits the country's desperate need for relief from unemployment to push changes that might mainly benefit stock scam artists. The idea that it could also allow unscrupulous corporations to conceal their misdeeds is truly infuriating. We just finished celebrating Sunshine Week; now Congress is hard at work promoting darkness.

(Illustration with photo of Rep. Fincher from Dirt Diggers Digest.)