OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Encouraging Public Offerings Act of 2023

Floor Speech

Date: June 5, 2023
Location: Washington, DC


Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 2793, the Encouraging Public Offerings Act of 2023, sponsored by the gentlewoman from Missouri.

I think the gentlewoman has laid it out clearly. We are talking here about the process by which a company goes public, and this allows the company to do two things before they go public.

One of those is to confer with prospective investors, and the other is to get a nonpublic review by the SEC staff of their registration statement.

This process of allowing these things to happen has been tried with ESG companies. The SEC has now adopted it as a policy for other companies, and now this bill would codify that decision.

I should point out this bill came before our committee, and the vote was 39-1. This bill codifies the recent SEC rule that allows any issuer, not just an ESG, to submit a confidential draft of their registration statement for nonpublic review.

This bill also allows the issuers to confer with prospective investors; in effect, testing the waters about whether a public offering makes sense.

By freeing all issuers to use these two methods and codifying the SEC's administrative action, we can provide all companies with the assurance that these tools will be available to them.

This bill codifies, as I have said, the 2019 SEC rulemaking that allows issuers to test the waters before going public.

This allows the issuer to gauge interest in their public offering by talking to certain institutional investors without first needing to file a registration statement.

Given the cost of going through the entire process, it only makes sense to allow companies to talk to institutional investors before they decide to go public and commit themselves to that large cost.

Overall, this makes it easier for companies to access our capital markets to get the capital they need to grow their businesses.

Mr. Speaker, this bill is one that should be adopted. The vote in committee was 39-1. I urge my colleagues to support it.

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