SEC Advisory Committee Identifies Witnesses For New York Meeting

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Advisory Committee on Smaller Public Companies has identified the witnesses it intends to call at its previously scheduled meeting in New York City on the afternoon of Friday, Oc-tober 14. The witnesses all represent investors in small cap companies, with several in-vestment fund managers, a pension fund manager, a hedge fund manager and a separate accounts manager among those expected to testify.

The Advisory Committee was established by the SEC to examine the impact of the Sar-banes-Oxley Act and other federal securities laws on smaller companies. The Commit-tee's mission is to provide recommendations to the SEC to assure that the costs and bur-dens of federal securities regulation for smaller companies are commensurate with the benefits to investors and the public.

The New York meeting is the last meeting at which the Advisory Committee expects to hear testimony from witnesses before it publicly discusses the recommendations it will make at a meeting to be held in Washington, D.C. on October 24 and 25. The Committee is expected to present its final report containing its recommendations to the Commission in April 2006.

The New York meeting will be held in Columbia Law School's Jerome Greene Hall, Room 103, 435 West 116th Street, beginning at 1:00 p.m. The meeting will be audio webcast on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. The witnesses will present their views as two separate panels, with one panel beginning at 1:00 p.m. and the other beginning at 3:15 p.m.

The witnesses identified by the Advisory Committee are: