The MSRB released a report which documents the statistics of the average time it takes the issuers of municipal securities, and other obligated persons to make their financial information available to the public after the end of a fiscal year. The report is the first of its kind. It analyzes the submissions of financial disclosures made to the MSRB's Electronic Municipal Market Access ("EMMA") system between January 2010 and June 2013, and measures the number of days after the end of a fiscal year in which audited financial statements and annual financial information were made available

The SEC approved proposed rule changes to FINRA Rule 2360 ("Options") and Rule 4210 ("Margin Requirements") relating to the treatment of over-the-counter ("OTC") options cleared by the Options Clearing Corporations ("OCC"). The amendments to Rule 2360 treat OCC Cleared OTC Options as conventional options (rather than as "standardized"; i.e., exchange-listed) for purposes of the rule, and amend certain of the definitions in the rule, among other changes. The amendments to Rule 4210 include changes to certain definitions in order to provide for the same margin treatment for OCC Cleared OTC

Ohio Securities Commissioner Andrea Seidt has begun a one-year term as president of the North American Securities Administrators Association ("NASAA"). For the past year, Seidt served as NASAA's vice president and chair of the Investment Adviser Section. In her inaugural address in Salt Lake City, Seidt said that NASAA's agenda for state and provincial securities will continue to focus on "smarter regulation," highlighting specifically a plan for the development of NASAA's own electronic filing system for multi-state offerings. See: NASAA Press Release; Commissioner Seidt's Inaugural Address.

FINRA released a podcast summarizing the latest FINRA notices, news, and compliance resources for September 2013. The latest FINRA notices discussed in the podcast include FINRA's recent request for comments on a revised proposal membership about application proceedings, which would transfer current NASD membership proceeding rules into the FINRA rulebook. The podcast also summarized recently released compliance resources from FINRA, including two new videos and a live video webinar and suitability program discussing methods for complying with the suitability rule. The podcast concluded with a

FINRA has filed an amendment to a previously proposed rule change that will consolidate certain NASD and NYSE supervision rules into FINRA supervision rules. FINRA had received a number of comments on the original proposal, including 555 copies of a form letter. The SEC published a notice to solicit comments on the supervisory proposal, as amended in light of the various comments. The original rule amendment was issued in June of 2013 (see description in the item linked below). In the revised proposal (see pages 4-9), FINRA modified a number of the proposed requirements that commenters argued