“U.S. legislation that would roll back securities disclosure and governance rules in the name ofjob creation is being attacked by consumer advocates and former regulators as an evisceration of investor protections in place since the 1930s.
The package of bills awaiting Senate action after receiving broad bipartisan support in a House vote last week would destroy safeguards dating as far back as the laws that created the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Lynn E. Turner, a former SEC chief accountant.
“It won’t create jobs, but it will simplify fraud,” Turner said in an interview last week. “This would be better known as the bucket-shop and penny-stock fraud reauthorization act of 2012,” he said, referring to practices banned under securities law.
The Republican-led House, in a show of election-year comity, voted 390-23 to approve measures that would among other things undo a ban on closely held firms soliciting investments, increase the number of investors such firms can have and exempt newly public companies with less than $1 billion in revenue from some reporting requirements of the Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley laws. President Barack Obama has backed the legislation as a way to help spur job creation, and Senate Democrats have said they will move quickly on their own version.
“What we’re trying to do is to regain the confidence of the people that sent us here,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican, said after the March 8 vote….”
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