By Cydney Posner

The SEC has issued a new fee rate advisory providing that, in fiscal year 2012, the fees that public companies and other issuers pay to register their securities with the SEC will be set at $114.60 per million dollars. (Note that this new fee rate advisory tells quite a different tale from the SEC's initial advisory for fiscal 2012, which certainly caused some confusion at the time.) As a result of changes made under Dodd Frank, the annual rate changes for fees paid under Section 6(b) of the Securities Act and Sections 13(e) and 14(g) of the Exchange Act must take effect on the first day of each fiscal year. (Remember that the fee rate changes used to be delayed until there was a Congressional budget deal for the year, typically well past the start of the new fiscal year.) Accordingly, effective October 1, 2011, the Section 6(b) fee rate applicable to the registration of securities, the Section 13(e) fee rate applicable to the repurchase of securities and the Section 14(g) fee rates applicable to proxy solicitations and statements in corporate control transactions will decrease from $116.10 per million dollars to $114.60 per million dollars.

As the SEC's press release explains, the SEC makes annual adjustments to the fee rates based on statutory target amounts. Fee rates are set at levels that the SEC projects will generate collections equal to those targets. The statutory target for fiscal year 2012 is $425 million.

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