View or download a PDF of the letter here. AFR and over 30 organizations wrote to House leadership in opposition to eight anti-ESG bills that were marked up by the House Financial Services Committee and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. These bills are part
Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund submitted a comment letter to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in support of its proposal to require public companies to disaggregate certain costs from expense captions, with a focus on the disaggregation of employee compensation costs. AFREF made a series of recommendations to improve these disclosures, including recommendations to include workers beyond employees in the disclosures.
Americans for Financial Reform sent a letter to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee supporting the Credit Card Competition Act of 2023. The Credit Card Competition Act will introduce much needed competition in a captured market and benefit consumers.
AFR sent a letter in opposition to four legislative proposals that the House Committee on Education and the Workforce is scheduled to consider at its September 14th Full Committee Markup. These bills’ amendments to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) would undermine workers’ retirement security and are part of a broader political campaign against common sense investment practices. The campaign seeks to force financial actors to ignore a slew of financial risks regardless of the consequences for workers’ retirement security and the integrity of our financial system.
Americans for Financial Reform sent a letter to the House Financial Services Committee opposing bills that undermine shareholders’ ability to make sound financial decisions and hold corporations accountable. In our letter, we provide an overview of the bills noticed during the various ESG hearings and briefly discuss why we oppose them.
AFR led a coalition letter to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee ahead of their hearing titled “Holding Executives Accountable for Recent Bank Failures.” The letter calls for mandatory clawbacks of incentive-based executive compensation and gains from stock trades in cases of bank failure.
AFREF joined a letter led by the Open Markets Institute and supported by 50 labor and public interest groups urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban non-compete clauses as well as functionally equivalent restraints such as training repayment agreement provisions (or TRAPs), for all workers.
President Biden’s and Congress’s efforts to begin to hold the executives of Silicon Valley Branch accountable are important to rein in the reckless and imprudent practices of senior bank executives, who have gamed our financial system and hurt communities in the process. True accountability includes executives forfeiting enormous bonuses, while their bank is on the brink of failure.
AFREF and the Institute for Policy Studies, Global Economy Project led a comment letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) about its uniform guidance, which sets the boundaries around the types of strings states and localities are allowed to attach when they disburse federal funds. This comment letter argues state and local governments should be allowed to give preferential treatment to bidders that commit to make productive investments in their companies and refrain from stock buybacks and excessive executive compensation.
AFREF submitted a comment letter in support of the SEC’s proposed rule on clawbacks of erroneously-awarded executive compensation. Once finalized, the rule will signify the long-overdue implementation of a Dodd-Frank provision that sought to improve incentives for honest and transparent corporate governance by creating a mechanism for the clawing back of compensation awarded based on inaccurate financial statements. AFREF submitted a comment in support of the proposed rule in 2015, and submitted this additional comment to answer questions raised by the Commission upon reopening the comment period