From: Richard Henery [rmuel7755@yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 11:10 PM To: rule-comments@sec.gov Subject: S7-36-02 Mr. Secretary: I appreciate the opportunity to comment on your proposed rule S7-36-02 titled Disclosure of Proxy Voting Policies and Proxy Voting Records by Registered Management Investment Companies. I support the proposal outlined on your web site sec.gov. I feel it to be most important for an ordinary person trusting their financial future to, for example, a mutual fund company, to be able to know how they vote the shares that they purchased. They used the persons money and charge the person to manage their funds. I see no reason for outlandish stock option plans, multimillion dollar salaries or "off the books" financial arrangements or the use of less than "on the street" repeatable audit firms. If the mutual fund companies agree that they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, they should be willing to share the information on how they vote on items such as those listed above. I would also be interested to know if a fund is really interested in maximizing dividends. For example, I would like to be able to compare the behavior in practice of Price Dividend Growth Fund with Fidelity Dividend Growth Fund. I would like to know if either or both (or another fund company of your choice) owned CISCO and, in the recent past, voted against the proposal to institute a dividend. I could use this information decide into which fund to shift my retirement funds. Providing this information would not involve the release of harmful proprietary information assuming the Fund exercises diligence and really vote their shares on their investors behalf. Of course there could be negative consequences for the company if they were less than vigorous in protecting shareholder interests but to me this is one of the purposes of the proposed rule. I would also like to see the information rapidly published, preferably before the shareholder vote, in an easily accessible place such as a web site. This would be in addition to the proposals in the draft rule above. None of these items would be a major chore for an open end or closed end mutual fund. The day of electronics has arrived and such information is only a computer program away. In fact, sending an email to their shareholder should not be a problem. Should there be any questions, my best guess is that any spam artist would be glad to help them out for a trivial fee. Thank you very much, R. Mueller 1001 Green Bay Road #310 Winnetka, Il 60093 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now