Videotaped remarks from Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), will open the annual Government-Business Forum on Small Business Capital Formation. The Forum will be held on Friday, September 29, beginning at 9:00 a.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the SEC.

The morning agenda includes two roundtable discussions open to the public and available online as a webcast at www.sec.gov. A luncheon address, also to be taped and archived at www.sec.gov, by Peter J. Wallison, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former Counsel to President Ronald Reagan, will follow the roundtables. The afternoon agenda includes sessions for developing recommendations for government and private action to improve the environment for small business capital formation, including a workshop on private-placement broker dealers.

The first morning roundtable, from 9:15 to 10:45 a.m., will discuss the advantages to smaller public companies of using and filing interactive data with the SEC. John W. White, Director of the Commission’s Division of Corporate Finance, will moderate the roundtable whose panelists include:

• Greg D. Adams, Director, Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO), EDGAR Online, Inc. (Norwalk, Conn.)

• Brian R. Balbirnie, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), My EDGAR, Inc. (Cary, North Carolina)

• Malcolm C. Persen, CFO, Radyne Corporation (Phoenix, Ariz.)

• R. Christopher Whalen, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Institutional Risk Analytics (Hawthorne, Calif.)

The second roundtable, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., will discuss current issues in capital raising techniques for small business, such as the status of the initial public offering (IPO) market and private investment in public equity (PIPE) offerings. This roundatable will be co-moderated by Martin P. Dunn, Deputy Director of the Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance, and Mark Morgenstern, Partner in the San Francisco office of Sonnenschein Nash & Rosenthal. Panelists will include:

• John D. Hogoboom, Member, Lowenstein Sandler PC (Roseland, New Jersey)

• Philip C. Marchal, Director, Equity Capital Markets, BMO Capital Markets (New York, New York)

• Steven D. Pidgeon, Partner, Snell & Wilmer LLP (Phoenix, Ariz.)

• Anna T. Pinedo, Partner, Morrison & Foerster LLP (New York, New York)
• Byron Roth, chairman and CEO, Roth Capital Partners (Newport Beach, Calif.)

The morning portion of the forum will be held in the auditorium at the Commission’s headquarters at 100 F. Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. Doors will open at 8:00 a.m. Visitors will be subject to security checks. For planning purposes, members of the public wishing to attend are asked to notify the Commission by sending an e-mail message to the SEC’s Office of Small Business Policy at smallbusiness@sec.gov or in writing to the office at 100 F. Street, NE, Washington, D.C., 20549-3628 or by calling the office at (202) 551-3460.

The forum agenda, online registration forms and other information, is available online at www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/sbforum.shtml.