There was a fascinating debate in the House Financial Committee today during the consideration of H.R. 2441 – The Improving Disclosure for Investors Act. The debate occurred prior to the HFSC’s vote to advance the legislation.
We are sharing our firm’s proprietary transcript of the relevant portion of the markup.
The debate around this bill, which was debated and passed an “Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute to H.R. 2441” on Tuesday, involved a clash between two influential coalitions.
On one side is an aggressive, well-funded, and well led coalition of Wall Street financial firms who stand to realize cost reductions through pushing clients to receive their (federally required) securities investment disclosures electronically, rather than by paper.
On the other side is a coalition of organizations representing older Americans, consumer interests, and labor interests. This coalition includes AARP, Consumer Federation of America, AFL-CIO, and many others.
Wall Street brokerages have been aggressively pushing individual clients to “voluntary” and affirmatively “opt in” to receiving disclosures electronically for years.
The significance of H.R. 2441 is that it would allow firms to simply “default” customer into e-delivery, obviating the next to obtain the customer’s permission first.
In the course of debate, there was an important and complicated “colloquy.”
Colloquies, for those not familiar, are a sort of legislative/legal art, in which a committee’s discussion of a bill is formally incorporated into the bill’s “legislative history.” It also sometimes stipulates conditions that must be met prior to any further action a bill.
In this case, the colloquy was held between the bills leading bill sponsors, Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich) and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), and an objecting member – Rep. Sylvia Garcia. It was overseen and facilitated by HFSC Chair French Hill (R-Ark) and HFSC Ranking Democrat Maxine Waters (R-CA). The Committee subsequently voted 39-11 to adopt the bill.
We will be spotlighting some of the key exchanges from the colloquy in a subsequent post.
transcript-of-hfsc-consideration-of-ans-to-hr-2441-may-20-2025
