Wendy Sherman: “passing the Senate bill is but the first step. Hopefully, the conferees will go beyond even the Senate bill or will take…”

“passing the Senate bill is but the first step. Hopefully, the conferees will go beyond even the Senate bill or will take up new legislation in the Committee on Financial Services. The Senate bill contains the provisions that reauthorize the SEC and contains provisions that talk about expensing stock options. We can no longer leave this issue to the Financial Accounting Standards Board that acknowledged long ago that it was best to expense stock options and then refused to make that mandatory. Nor can we allow the recent situation where consumers can compare Coke and Pepsi, but investors cannot, because the two similar companies use different methods of accounting for stock options. Further, in reauthorizing the SEC, we must demand that they actually read the filings of the largest 1,000 companies, something that their chairman refuses to even consider because he has adopted a ``hear no evil, see no evil'' approach. Mr. Speaker, we need to go far beyond even the Senate bill.”