I would also prefer more frequent reports, but only if they were less burdensome and risky.
Every company doesn't have to be public. The US taxpayer underwrites US securities markets, and companies that trade on our public markets have access to some of the deepest pools of low-cost liquidity in the world. But companies are obviously free to list elsewhere.
> the number of public corporations is already in decline.
Separate problem. IIRC HBS studied this and basically the issue is we stopped enforcing our anti-competition laws a while back[1]. So we end up with a fraction of firms that each sector would financially support. Both because it creates giants that are much harder to compete against, and because it allows mergers between competing firms that AFAIK could be deemed illegal under existing laws.
1 - See, for example the Robinson-Patman Act, whose dormancy allows big box retailers to exist. This law has never been repealed.
The "audit" certifies a certain hash of a repo that produces known-good results, and if you use a different commit in that repo you have explain in an SEC filing why you modified things.
Basically reproducible builds for financial results:
But any "mistakes" that are made are simply corrected the next reporting period (whether that's monthly, fortnightly, weekly, or daily) in this more-frequent proposal.
The 'crunches' that occur at quarter/period-end are there because there is so much attention put on those reports because they're so infrequent. If the sampling rate is higher then errors are corrected that much sooner.
The reports are generated on the books in the state that they currently are in on a monthly/fortnightly/weekly/daily basis, and any adjustments will be "fixed" in the next reporting period. The reason why there's so much pressure to get them "correct" now is because of the (relatively) infrequent reporting. If you know that things will be 'sorted out' in a fortnight (two weeks), or whatever, there's less pressure now to get them "right".
There will be an expectation of less perfecttion and more corrections and better 'smoothing' due to the higher 'sampling rate'.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sarbanes-Oxley-Act
Like the building and electrical code, these regulations were written in blood.
Except Enron's results were audited. By (now defunct) Arthur Anderson:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen#Collapse
The auditing already existed and didn't stop Enron (or WorldCom; see also the silliness of GE under Jack Welch).
Sure SOx added more rules, but it's not like folks were flying without a net before.