SEC’s Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee Holds Meeting

The SEC’s Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee held a meeting on April 28, 2026, to discuss initial public offerings (IPOs) — specifically, strategies aimed at reversing the trend of declining IPOs. In his prepared remarks (delivered virtually) at the meeting, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins indicated his belief that various regulations introduced over the years have proved a hindrance to undertaking an IPO and noted that a key goal of his agenda as chairman is to “help all companies — but especially the smaller ones — in going and staying public.” Mr. Atkins briefly summarized several ideas he has proposed for achieving this goal, including the following:

• Providing “a regulatory ‘on-ramp’ that does not automatically terminate 5 years after a company becomes public.”
• Decreasing the complexity of the Form S-3 registration requirements by giving “nearly all small public companies . . . full access to ‘shelf registration.’”
• Giving companies the flexibility to file their “regulatory reports quarterly or semiannually” depending on “their industry, business model, and investor expectations.”

Also see the speeches at the meeting by SEC Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda.