For retired Rutgers professor, new role not lost in translation: A New Jersey college professor is put in charge of implementing the U.S. Security Exchange Commission’s Plain English initiative, which requires financial reporting by public companies to be written in language understandable by laypersons — the mythical “average individual investor.”
When it comes to corporate gobbledygook, William Lutz shares your pain.
As a consultant to promote the use of plain English in financial documents, the retired Rutgers professor managed to plow through 58 mutual fund prospectuses before crying “uncle.”
“My brain was turning to pablum,” he said.
I sympathize. I often find myself confronting an even more mind-bending challenge in my financial translation work: How to turn what is turgid in the source language — here in Brazil, it’s known as juridiquês, or “legal mumbo-jumbo” — into Plain English in the target, if that is what the regulator your clients are providing disclosure to demands.
And it really does seem that the SEC is more serious about demanding it. There are those who say it ought to have spent more time thinking about junk securitiziations than Plain English and XBRL, but the fact is that this is what has passed for reform that benefits the small investor under the reign of Chairman Christopher Cox.
Lutz, author of “The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone’s Saying Anymore,” has been put in charge of a Securities and Exchange Commission effort to fundamentally revamp the way companies provide information to the investing public.
I warms my heart to see college professors put in charge of fundamentally revamping the real world. Expect fierce resistance from those who inhabit it.
It took 75 years for regulators to come up with an eye-glazing collection of 10-Ks, DEF14As, SC-13G/As and other arcane reporting documents. Lutz, named to his post two weeks ago, has six months to assemble a plan to reshape disclosure from the ground up.
The Plain Englishman is an anarchist:
“The technical term is ‘blow up all the forms’,” he said.
I presented some material on Plain English to a client (one of those who have made up their minds to agree wholeheartedly with you and then not do what you advise) recently.
I will try to organize that and post it to the Standards & Practices section of the Boi Zebu Editorial Services Web site. The site is still under construction, so bear with me.
