Editor’s note: This is general educational information about how securities and accounting rules are made. It is not advice and it does not concern any particular company or security. It follows documented rulemakings on the official records listed at the end.
Analysis: three routes, and what each one leaves visible
Set the three side by side and the difference is not consultation, which all of them run, but where the decision sits and what the public can see afterwards.
The American route is the most exposed. Because approval happens by published order, every extension, every institution of proceedings and every comment letter is dated and citable, and the approving order has to walk through the objections it is rejecting. That produces a long calendar. Six months for two listing rules is the price of building a record that a court could later review.
The standard-setting route inverts the visibility. The consultation is on a draft written elsewhere, by the IASB, and the local body’s contribution is a submission rather than a decision. A reader can see the exposure draft and the comment letters, but the adoption question, whether Singapore takes the standard and for which entities, is answered later and separately. The ASC’s stated qualification about local circumstances is where that discretion lives, and it is stated as a principle rather than as a test.
The European route pushes the substance furthest from view at the point of legislation. The Regulation names the topics on which technical standards may be made and hands the drafting to ESMA and the adoption to the Commission, which means the operative detail of what a prospectus must contain is settled after the legislative debate has ended, in instruments most readers never see debated at all.
Two observations follow. First, the length of a rulemaking is a poor proxy for the size of the change. The Nasdaq order concerns two rules and took months because the statute required a specific sequence of published steps. Second, anyone tracking a coming disclosure requirement should identify which of the three routes it is travelling before looking for documents, because each leaves its trace in a different place: a Federal Register docket, an exposure draft and submissions file, or a delegated act that appears after the Regulation is already law. What none of these records establishes is the counterfactual. A comment file shows what was argued, not what the rule would have looked like had nobody written in.
What the documents say
Rule changes in securities markets are usually described in the abstract: a regulator proposes, the industry comments, the regulator decides. The abstraction hides the part that matters, which is that every step leaves a dated public document, and the documents can be read in order. One completed American rulemaking, running from August 2024 to January 2025, shows the whole sequence with the dates attached.
A rulemaking with every step on the record
On 6 August 2024 The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, under Section 19(b)(1) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 19b-4 made under it, a proposed rule change to modify the minimum bid price compliance periods and the delisting appeals process in Nasdaq Rules 5810 and 5815. Filing is not deciding. The proposal was published for comment in the Federal Register on 23 August 2024 as Securities Exchange Act Release No. 100767, at 89 FR 68228.
The statutory clock then moved twice. On 3 October 2024 the Commission acted under Section 19(b)(2) to designate a longer period within which to approve, disapprove, or institute proceedings, naming 21 November 2024 as the new date. On 20 November 2024 it went further and initiated proceedings under Section 19(b)(2)(B) to determine whether to approve or disapprove the change. Approval came on 17 January 2025 as Release No. 34-102245 and was published on 23 January 2025, at pages 8081 to 8087 of volume 90 of the Federal Register.
Almost six months elapsed for a change to two listing rules, most of it consumed by procedural steps the statute requires rather than by drafting.
What the comment file actually contained
The comments were not a formality and they were not unanimous. Letters supporting the proposal came from an individual commenter, from a joint letter signed by the American Securities Association, Better Markets, the Healthy Markets Association, Investors Exchange LLC and Themis Trading LLC, and from the American Consumer and Investor Institute, OTC Markets Group Inc. and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Several of those supporters told the Commission the proposal did not go far enough on listing standards and enforcement, and pointed to a separate Petition for Rulemaking on Exchange Listings of Penny Stocks filed by Virtu Financial, Inc. on 15 July 2024. The Commission recorded those recommendations and stated they were not before it in this proposal.
Opposition was targeted rather than total. Commenters including Tonix Pharmaceuticals Holding Corp. and the law firm Thompson Hine opposed the part of the proposal dealing with prior reverse splits while saying they did not object to the appeals part. Their argument was that the change could restrict access to capital for smaller Nasdaq-listed companies, particularly in biotechnology, and could encourage short selling strategies aimed at pushing a share price down. One argued that factors beyond financial or operational distress drive reverse splits at companies that depend on frequent capital raises and face volatile prices. Another asked the Commission to let the market absorb the effects of earlier Nasdaq changes before approving a related one. An anonymous commenter, generally supportive, objected that the proposal took no account of the ratio of a prior split or of whether the company had been in compliance at the time.
The Commission approved the proposal anyway, and its order says why: it found the proposal before it consistent with the Exchange Act. That is the honest description of what a comment file does. It builds a record the decision has to be defensible against, not a vote the regulator has to follow.
The accounting standards route runs on a different clock
Disclosure requirements also arrive through accounting standard setters, and there the sequence is different. Singapore’s Accounting Standards Committee describes its aim as adopting the IFRS Accounting Standards issued by the International Accounting Standards Board, on the view that convergence improves transparency and comparability and lowers compliance costs both for companies investing in Singapore and for local companies operating abroad. That intention is qualified: the ASC says it will track new IFRS standards for possible adoption while taking account of local economic and business circumstances and the type of entity a standard would apply to.
The committee describes its process as formal and rigorous, designed so that the various sectors and stakeholder groups are all given adequate opportunities to express their views, and it feeds views the other way too, raising local issues on IASB projects, sitting on standard-setters’ meetings and working with IASB liaison representatives and the Asian-Oceanian Standard-Setters Group.
The consultation record shows the mechanics. ACRA’s 2026 ASC consultations page, updated 20 April 2026, carries the year’s IASB consultation documents, with comments submitted directly to the committee. Exposure Draft ED/2026/1, on amendments to the fair value option for investments in associates and joint ventures under IAS 28, closed for comment on 13 Mar 2026, and the submissions received are published separately. The consultation is on the international draft; the adoption decision is local.
The European Union adds a third pattern. Under Regulation (EU) 2017/1129, the detail of prospectus rules is not written in the Regulation itself. The Commission is empowered to adopt regulatory technical standards developed by the European Securities and Markets Authority covering, among other things, the content and format of the key financial information in the summary, when information may be omitted, what may be incorporated by reference, publication of the prospectus, advertisements, and when a supplement is required. Those standards are adopted as delegated acts.
