On Friday, the SEC Division of Corporation Finance advised companies and shareholder proponents to either exclude or redact all personally identifiable and other sensitive information, such as brokerage account numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers of individual shareholders, that is not relevant to its consideration of a no-action request, before submitting the materials to the Division. According to the announcement, although staff makes an effort to redact such information before posting the materials publicly, that process is imperfect and can cause delays.
As such, effective immediately, staff may require no-action materials that include personally identifiable and other sensitive information to be resubmitted before it will substantively consider the request. The announcement notes that the staff legal bulletins governing the process (here, here, and here) call for submission of all “relevant” correspondence, which typically would exclude personally identifiable and other sensitive information except in those cases where the bases for a no-action request require that information be provided so that staff can properly evaluate the request.
Access additional resources on our Shareholder Proposals page.