SEC Staff ‘Working Expeditiously’ on Filings After Government Shutdown

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is reportedly prioritizing companies’ registration statements for initial public offerings and other ways to raise money as it tries to catch up on the work that was left undone during the government shutdown.

The regulator has put routine reviews of public company financial statements at the bottom of its list of priorities, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Nov. 19).

Despite the SEC’s focus on IPOs, companies that are looking to go public are unlikely to be able to do so before 2026 because of the number of registration statements that were submitted during the shutdown — more than 900 — and the upcoming holidays, according to the report.

In a guidance released after the government shutdown, on Thursday (Nov. 13), the SEC said: “Division staff is working expeditiously to clear the backlog of filings.”

It was reported on Oct. 22, during the government shutdown, that the SEC was still monitoring the markets for signs of manipulative behavior.

“Even during the shutdown, as we conduct our surveillance on the marketplace, we have stopped trading on eight foreign companies on Nasdaq that showed indicia of manipulative behavior — ramp and dump, we call it,” SEC Chair Paul Atkins told CNBC at the time. “So we are monitoring the market for behavior that indicates, you know, hanky-panky going on in the marketplace.”

On Oct. 12, it was reported that regulators were making it easier for companies to go public during the government shutdown.

In an announcement posted to its website on Oct. 9, the SEC said that because officials were not able to go over registration statements, the SEC would not look to penalize companies that left out pricing information from prospectuses filed during the shutdown and then listed either during or after the shutdown.

Even after the government reopened, things were not back to normal. It was reported Thursday (Nov. 13) that while agencies had reopened and federal workers returned to their offices, not all government functions were back to normal.

For example, air travel remained disrupted, and economic data critical to businesses and policymakers was delayed and may not be released at all.