The lost art of proofreading could see a missing “s” disrupt the federal government’s controversial effort to reduce reporting requirements for public companies.
In May, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a new rule that would let publicly listed companies report their financial results twice a year instead of every quarter, as is currently required. The agency asked the public to weigh in and send its feedback to [email protected]. But the comment inbox that the SEC lists on its own instructions page—and has printed in almost every rule proposal it has issued since at least 2019—is [email protected]. With an “s.”
The comment (or…comments) period on the semiannual reporting rule closed on July 6, but the email address confusion cropped up on Monday in a letter to the commission from nonprofit investor advocate Better Markets. The letter, addressed to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda, said the posted email address was “incorrect,” and said the error “undoubtedly deprived some members of the public of the opportunity to express their views on an extensive, far-reaching and dramatic change to corporate reporting that upends half a century of practice.”
How many public comments were sent to the rule-comment email, instead of the rule-comments address, is not clear. But Better Markets cited several examples of people who claimed feedback they sent to the “rule-comment” address have not appeared on the SEC website where public comments are published.
The SEC, in a statement to UnHerd, disputed there was anything wrong with the email address.
“Both email addresses are valid and accepted methods to submit public comments on this proposal,” said an SEC spokesperson in an email. The spokesman said the agency is working to post the “large number of comments” it has received.
According to UnHerd review of SEC rule proposals, the agency has a clear preference for one feedback channel. Of the 9 proposed SEC rules in 2026, all but two directed users to the “rule-comments” email address. The two outliers: the semiannual reporting proposal and a second rule on making more accommodations for emerging growth companies. In the latter case, the Federal Register version of the proposal, which is the federal government’s official channel for providing agency notices to the public, listed the singular email address, whereas the SEC’s online version soliciting comments used the plural
The SEC did not respond to further questions.
Semiannual earnings reports
A typo is embarrassing but in this case, the impact could be far reaching. The SEC itself tells every investor that all comments that go through email or an online submission form “will be posted on the SEC website” and that all comments sent in paper via mail “will be converted to PDF and then posted on our website.”
That isn’t simply because the SEC is being cordial. Agencies like the SEC are governed by what’s called the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which dictates how agencies make and amend rules. Traditionally, the SEC posts comments received in response to rule proposals and then in a final rule proposal, responds to the different themes that come up from the comments.
The APA and significant case law dictate these practices. A 2025 Yale Law Journal article noted that the Supreme Court confirmed that procedural duty. “An agency must consider and respond to significant comments received during the period for public comment.”
Plus, the APA is often the framework for a legal challenge against the SEC over one of its rules, and in the case of the semiannual reporting rule, there is plenty at stake.
The rule proposal, issued May 5 and published in the Federal Register on May 7, would let companies opt to file a new semiannual report on Form 10-S and an annual report in place of three quarterly 10-Qs and a 10-K annual report. SEC Chairman Atkins, in a statement, said the “rigidity” of quarterly reporting “has prevented companies and their investors from determining for themselves” what the right frequency is.
In terms of the comments posted, the SEC’s proposed rule hasn’t exactly received groundswell of support, with many critics arguing that the change would deprive individual investors of the level of information that institutional investors will have access to. Even Reddit’s popular /r/wallstreetbets submitted a comment telling the SEC that as community of 18 million retail investors, it was against the proposal.
“Many of us learned what a 10-Q was the hard way, which is to say we bought a stock, watched it fall 40% on an earnings release, and then read the filing to find out why,” the letter states. “That is a stupid order of operations and we acknowledge it. But it is also the entire mechanism by which a generation of retail investors taught itself to read financial statements, and the Commission is now proposing to cut that mechanism in half.”
Better Markets’ review of the posted comments suggests roughly 99% oppose the proposal, said Amanda Fischer, chief policy officer at Better Markets and former chief of staff at the SEC.
“It seems like there was a typo”
Fischer said Better Markets decided to alert the commission after she heard personally from an investor advocate and saw that others on LinkedIn were having difficulty submitting comments on the rule, and that the comments that had been submitted weren’t appearing online.
“What we arrived at was, and having worked at the commission and kind of knowing a little bit about this, from an outsider’s perspective we can’t prove dispositively what’s going on,” said Fischer. “It seems like there was a typo.”
Fischer told UnHerd that she went back to 2019, and saw only those two examples of the singular email address, while all the others used the plural “comments” to solicit feedback.
Better Markets noted in its letter to the SEC that there was previously what the agency described as a “technological error” in getting rule comments in 2021 and 2022. At that time, the SEC reopened 11 rules and one request for comment, including at-the-time highly anticipated rules governing money-market funds and short sellers. Fischer said she believes that while the SEC has posted that it got more than 66,000 comments in response to the semiannual reporting rule, there could be as many as 200,000. She heard the Atkins provided that number to SEC employees during a town hall; the SEC did not respond to a request for comment on the number.
In light of the issue and the potential for missing comments versus comments that have yet to be posted, Better Markets has called for the SEC to correct the record in the Federal Register, reopen the semiannual reporting rule as it did in 2022, and issue a public statement warning people that they may not have successfully sent their comment to the SEC.
The rub there is that there is overwhelming interest in the semiannual reporting rule and the SEC is still posting the comments it has received and has urged the public to keep checking the website, where one can sift through more than 2,000 pages of listed comments to find if yours was successfully submitted and posted.
Better Markets called on the SEC to do “whatever is necessary” to get the comments posted so people can double check. Without taking those steps, “the rulemaking record will be irreparably flawed and any effort to consider much less adopt this proposal will be irredeemably infirm under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
“If we do not understand that all comments have been received by the SEC, processed, and read, then it is impossible for us to know if the SEC has responded in a reasoned way to every good faith set of arguments leveled,” said Fischer, who joined the agency as a senior counselor to former chair Gary Gensler in June 2021 and departed in 2025 after serving as chief of staff. “And as a result, it would be difficult for the SEC to defend the rule on APA grounds, if challenged.”