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H.R. 1564 & 1105 Break Down Regulatory Barriers to Job Creation


Washington, June 19, 2013 -

Congressman Robert Hurt introduced two of the bills we considered in today's markup: H.R. 1564, the Audit Integrity and Job Protection Act and H.R. 1105, the Small Business Capital Access and Job Preservation Act. Both were reported favorably by the committee with bipartisan support. 

 

The first bill, H.R. 1564, prohibits the Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board from forcing public companies to automatically change or rotate their independent auditing firms. Selecting a company’s auditor is a decision that should be made by a company’s board of directors and ratified by its shareholders – not by a regulator in Washington. Instead of helping to increase transparency, mandated audit rotation could cause confusion for the company and its shareholders and impose an unnecessary cost on private companies. Furthermore, there are only a limited number of firms available to conduct audits, particularly for the largest multi-national corporations.

The second of Rep. Hurt's bills, H.R. 1105, would exempt advisers to certain private equity funds from the new, burdensome registration requirements imposed by the Dodd-Frank Act. Private equity and growth capital funds didn't cause the financial crisis. They continue to pose no systemic risk to the U.S. economy nor do they raise investor protection issues that require additional regulatory burdens. H.R. 1105 looks to reduce new, complicated and unnecessary registration requirements that unfairly burden the private equity industry -- an industry responsible for investing hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S.-based businesses each year.

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