SEC Chairman Mary Jo White’s disclosure effectiveness review project is not focused on reducing the amount of information available to investors, an agency official said Thursday.

The SEC is looking at areas where more information is needed by investors, Karen Garnett, the SEC’s Disclosure Operations associate director, said during a seminar at the Washington, D.C., Bar Association.

The agency has had four sets of partial proposals in the initiative, which is aimed at making issuer disclosures more helpful and digestible for investors.

Proxy disclosures and governance will be handled in future proposals, she said.

During the session, Council of Institutional Investors Executive Director Ken Bertsch said proxy statements have gotten significantly better in recent years without the SEC doing anything because companies realize the documents are effective for investor communication

He noted long proxy statements can be very useful---if they are well organized.

“We don’t hear a clamor for information reduction. We do hear the disclosures should be better organized,” said Bertsch.

He praised the SEC for emphasizing plain English in disclosures, which he said is an asset, even for sophisticated investors.

Bertsch, whose trade group is composed mostly of pension funds, said more work needs to be done to make disclosures useful for comparing companies within an industry.