SEC Guidance on Cyber Disclosures Falls Short: Stein

Her experience, she said, has been that investors and others "are asking for more information."

She pointed to institutional investors, asset managers, state treasurers and others who recently petitioned the SEC to require disclosure of environmental, social and governance (ESG) information by publicly traded companies in a standardized format.

The groups — which included representatives of the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), along with state treasurers from New York, Illinois, Connecticut and Oregon — petitioned the agency for a rulemaking on ESG disclosure.

The commission, Stein continued, "should not be focused on information overload or decreasing the amount or timeliness of information in the market, but rather should be focused on how to organize it and ensure that it is fairly presented."

The SEC, she stated, "must improve both the end product and the system of disclosure so that our capital markets remain the gold standard."

Stein noted her previous recommendation that the securities regulator form a Digital Disclosure Task Force "to include investors, analysts, academics, companies and technologists to leverage today's technology for a modern disclosure system."

More importantly, she argued, the commission "needs to engage in overseeing, and encouraging, a robust information environment," and work to set forth acceptable standards that contribute to the provision of useful information to investors. Quite simply, the commission needs to focus on information that is relevant to today's investors."

— Check out SEC's Stein Calls for Presidential Working Group on Retirement Security on ThinkAdvisor.