In September 2025, President Donald Trump said that US companies should only have to report earnings twice a year, rather than quarterly. SEC Chair Paul Atkins was quick to jump on the idea, telling reporters on September 29 that the agency was “working to fast track it” and that he hoped to have a proposal ready for public comment by late 2025 or early 2026.

That proposal has yet to appear, but the SEC’s still mulling a move away from quarterly reporting, as its March 2026 meeting of the Investor Advisory Committee showed. Biannual reporting was one of the hot topics discussed, along with potentially streamlining the rules governing nonfinancial, qualitative disclosures under Regulation S-K.

Atkins didn’t mention reporting cadence directly in his opening remarks. Noting that he favored the “minimum effective dose of regulation,” the chair said that rules should be “sensible and disciplined, with materiality as our North Star,” and that regulations “must scale with a company’s size and maturity.”

Quarterly reporting defended. A panel of experts from investment and law firms were in favor of trimming or modernizing Reg. S-K, but balked at the notion of moving to biannual reporting. Quarterly reporting, according to Stephen Berger, global head of government and regulatory policy at investment firm Citadel, “allows investors to make more informed investment decisions. That leads to more accurate market valuations, that better optimizes the allocation of capital to the real economy.”

Keep reading.—CV

You know the world is moving fast when an economist calls January—a mere two months ago—“ancient history.”

But the phrasing feels about right. On March 13, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released its January consumer spending report, which was initially scheduled for a February release but was delayed due to the 2025 government shutdown.

Rather than disregard the data for its tardiness, think of it as a telling dispatch from a bygone era. How were consumers spending before the war in Iran broke out? Pretty cautiously.

US consumer spending, which represents about two-thirds of economic activity, ticked up slightly in January, rising 0.4% from December. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted consumer spending increased just 0.1% for the month.

Keep reading.—NP

How much personally identifiable information (PII) do companies actually need to store?

Organizations are collecting massive amounts of data from customers, mobile devices, and more. Not all of it is stored securely: A roundup from cybersecurity company Huntress, for example, showed that billions of records containing PII are exposed from large-scale data breaches.

How does this happen? Ken Braatz, CTO for SupportNinja, told IT Brew that PII is harvested from users across browsers, search activity, cookies, and more. Companies tap that information to build and sell products.

But more data means more IT infrastructure such as storage, which means a larger attack surface. This is especially true when companies choose to hold onto particularly valuable information such as payment data, Social Security numbers, and more.

“I think a lot of companies out there view customer data as the Holy Grail, and in that they want all of the data and they turn that data into a massive asset,” Braatz said. “I don’t believe that having confidential PII is necessary to deliver value to the customers.”

Keep reading on IT Brew.—CN

Economic curveballs aren’t slowing down. On March 26, join CFO Brew and Oracle NetSuite to see how AI-powered insights help finance teams justify investment, accelerate close, and plan with confidence in uncertain times. Future-focused starts here. Register now.

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