(Image: Shutterstock)
When reports started circulating in January that the Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations was sending inquiries to asset management firms that offer environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment products, that came as no surprise to those familiar with regulatory reactions to investment trends.
The SEC has a long history of bringing enforcement actions against asset managers alleging a mismatch between what investors are told their funds are invested in and what investors' funds are actually invested in. For example, if your fund's prospectus says that it will employ a covered-call strategy but the fund instead employs individual naked index puts or short variance swap positions, the SEC may take issue.
So it stands to reason that if investment managers are touting ESG investments, the SEC will take an interest in verifying the accuracy of those representations.
However, what, precisely, it means to employ an ESG investment strategy can be difficult to determine with any certainty. In a memorable speech in June of last year, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce noted: "E, S, and G tend to travel in a pack these days, which makes it hard to establish reliable metrics for affixing scarlet letters. Governance at least offers some concrete markers, such as whether there are different share classes with different voting rights, the ease of proxy access, or whether the CEO and Chairman of the Board roles are held by two people."
Even with these examples, however, people do not agree on which way they cut, and they may not cut the same way at every company. In comparison to governance, the environmental and social categories tend to be much more nebulous.
The environmental category can include, for example, water usage, carbon footprint, emissions, what industry the company is in, and the quantity of packing materials the company uses. The social category can include how well a company treats its workers, what a company's diversity policy looks like, its customer privacy practices, whether there is community opposition to any of its operations, and whether the company sells guns or tobacco.
Not only is it difficult to define what should be included in ESG, but, once you do, it is difficult to figure out how to measure success or failure.
