Small Business and the SEC

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This site is dedicated to the entrepreneur -- whether high school student or senior citizen -- who has a fledgling business in need of a boost; garage capital has made every effort to keep these pages current and correct, but cannot warranty them for correctness or suitability to the viewer's circumstances; securities lawyer comments welcome...

When do you get involved with the SEC? The SEC has forms which they provide, like the IRS, and you submit these forms when it is appropriate, which the instructions to the form will tell you. There is a great deal one can do without contacting the SEC, except to download forms at their website. The SEC seems to claim jurisdiction over all securities, but there are a number of exemptions one may "seek." As pointed out elsewhere, these exemptions are typically common sense personal freedoms like: if I bend over backwards to not lie to a stranger, I can talk to them; if they are rich and powerful and can walk away, I can talk to them; if I am talking to an old friend, I can talk to them; if they are experts in what I am talking about, I can talk to them,...

There is a publication by the SEC that I recommend downloading*, called Q&A: Small Business and the SEC.

It can be found at the following link: Go to the main page http://www.sec.gov and click on "Small Business."

Since this link may not always be convenient, there is also a copy of the document here, Q&A: Small Business and the SEC from May of 1999.

I have found the SEC to be extremely cooperative and informed, and able and eager to respond by e-mail or telephone.

*For those unfamiliar with web sites, if you click on the title of a publication, and it becomes displayed on your screen, you can either print the document out by going to the file command you see near the top-left corner of your screen, and selecting print (if you have a printer) and following its questions and pushing "ok" or "print"; or you can save the whole document to disk, by clicking on "save" or "save as." I prefer "save as" because in Windows98 I can put it in one of a variety of folders, with a name I easily recognize. The SEC doesn't use "Adobe Acrobat" very much, which is fortunate, because Adobe Acrobat files have to be printed, they cannot be saved without the Acrobat Writer program which costs a few hundred dollars. When I say "download," I mean "saving" the document, unless the other kind of "downloading" is available.