Press Release
National Center for Public Policy Research Free Enterprise Project (FEP)
Washington, D.C. — A new petition submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission demands that the SEC issue guidance to publicly traded companies regarding the widespread abuse of virtual shareholder meetings.
The petition, submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project, asks the SEC “to take action as soon as possible under its existing regulatory powers to remedy this situation so that the 2026-2027 annual meeting season does not become another year of management wrongfully, if not shamefully, ducking interaction with shareholders.”
FEP Executive Director Steve Milloy writes:
[T]he Commission — a free market-oriented one, at that — ironically is both passively allowing and actively working to lock in the gains of anti-free enterprise activists. Our immediate concern is the Commission’s passivity with respect to the deterioration of annual shareholder meetings.
Since the COVID-19 era, many U.S. companies have been holding truncated and perfunctory shareholder meetings exclusively online. These brief virtual meetings deprive shareholders of their rights, as permitted by state law, to interface directly and meaningfully with corporate management at annual meetings. While virtual shareholder meetings may have made sense during the pandemic, the pandemic is over. Yet the virtual “shareholder meetings” continue….
Our request is simple and essential: Companies should return to in-person meetings and also allow shareholders to attend virtually, including a live video feed of the meeting.
