Bad SEC Listing in Search Results
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established to help protect investors by establishing fair markets. The SEC allows anyone to make a complaint about possible potential securities law violations. This means that if you are an investment manager or investment banker, someone could make a complaint about you to the SEC. If you are a publicly traded company and an employee’s job ends, that employee can also complain to the SEC if the job termination was the result of the employee knowing about and wanting to report potential shareholder fraud.
Unfortunately, anyone can make complaints to the SEC – including disgruntled employees and competitors. The SEC promises to investigate allegations carefully. However, if the SEC feels that there is merit in a claim it will place the name of the offending employer, investment manager, or investment banker on the SEC.gov website and in the financial archives. This information can be found through Google and other archives.
If you have a bad SEC listing, it is very difficult to change, even if the problem has been resolved or even if there has been a mistake in having your business listed on SEC at all. In some cases, SEC listings remain even after a company has undergone a complete overhaul and those responsible for shareholder fraud and securities law violations have long left. Worse, SEC listings tend to rank very high in search engines, even years later, making it very hard for a business to improve its image.
One of the first things you should do is to work with the SEC to ensure that they have all the information they need to ensure that they make the correct judgment. If there is no basis for the complaint, make sure that you send evidence to the SEC and ask that this information is included on the website. It may take some time to work everything out with the SEC, but you need to stay friendly and professional – as well as persistent. Do not allow a bad SEC listing to exist if the claims made against you are groundless. Use your blog, website, and other online means to share with your visitors the facts about the situation.
If the SEC listing is, unfortunately, accurate, then you will need to clean house first. Change your practices so that they are transparent and start distancing your company from whatever influence caused the problem in the first place. Share all the new changes with your customers and clients via your website and blog. Apologize and explain why this will never happen again. It will take longer to establish trust if your SEC listing was justified, but a good SEO strategy and a sincere and transparent approach to business practices will go a long way towards bolstering your reputation.