Congress told the Securities and Exchanges Commission to adopt a resource extraction disclosure rule by no later than April 17, 2011.  The SEC missed that statutory deadline by over a year.  After the SEC belatedly adopted a rule in 2012, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacated it and sent it back to the SEC.  American Petroleum Institute v. SEC, 953 F. Supp. 2d 5 (D. D.C. 2013).  When the SEC failed for over a year to adopt a new rule, Oxfam America sued the SEC again. After the Court ruled that the SEC had unlawfully withheld action, the SEC in December proposed to vote on a final rule by June 27 of this year.

The SEC has received over 100,000 comments, most of which are form comment letters.  Although the SEC’s website includes a Sunshine Act notice of a meeting this Thursday, the vote won’t occur then as the notice states that this will be a closed meeting.  Even assuming that the SEC will vote by the end of this month, it is at least theoretically possible that there are not enough favorable votes to adopt a final rule.  If the SEC adopts a final rule today, it would have violated the law for only 5 years, 1 month, and 29 days.