As expected, in one of his final acts in office a few weeks ago, Pres. Obama signed the SEC Small Business Advocate Act of 2016 into law. This bill had pretty wide bipartisan support in Congress. Like most good ideas, it’s pretty simple: It sets up an Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation, as well as a Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee within the SEC.
The Advocate’s job will include assisting small businesses with problems they have with the SEC or other regulators, identify problems they have with securing capital, analyze proposed rules and their impact on small businesses, and organize the annual SEC small business conference at which your humble blogger recently spoke. The Advisory Committee will give the SEC advice on rules, regulations and policies relating to capital raising, trading and reporting and governance requirements of small businesses.
Where this office will set up within the SEC is not clear. There already exists a pretty robust Office of Small Business Policy led by the very capable Sebastian Gomez Abero, and they currently organize the annual conference. I assume, even though this got passed a few weeks ago, that action to implement this will await the new SEC Chair. But let’s stay tuned…
