Securities Compliance & Corporate Governance · General Counsel / Insider Counsel Guide

Answering a Section 16(b) Demand Letter

A Section 16(b) demand letter arrives with a number attached: a plaintiff firm's own lowest-in/highest-out match over an insider's Form 4 filings, and a claimed profit the corporation is asked to recover. The recipient side, whether the insider or the issuer's general counsel, has had no deterministic free way to independently check that number before it becomes a negotiating position. This pack composes two nodes so counsel can recompute the matchable-pair figure from the same declared transaction facts, compare it against what the letter claims, and hold a receipt of the comparison rather than a spreadsheet nobody can replay.

2-Node Pack Declared Inputs Only Matches the Plaintiff's Own Construction Zero PII
🔒 All inputs are processed locally in your browser. No data is transmitted. Do not enter real personal data – use synthetic or anonymised inputs only.
Not legal advice, and the fence is the point. Every transaction is SUPPLIED by you and treated as asserted. This pack opens no connection to EDGAR and no brokerage record, and it cannot establish that a declared transaction happened, on the declared date, at the declared price. A recompute is not a matchability determination, not an exemption ruling, and not a settlement recommendation. Whether the demand letter's underlying theory holds, and what a divergence or a match means for your matter, are questions for counsel.
The Two Nodes

How the pack is composed

Stage 1 does the arithmetic the demand letter itself relies on: the Smolowe/Gratz lowest-in/highest-out maximal-recovery construction, applied to a declared transaction list rather than to the letter's own assertions. Stage 2 turns the resulting receipt into something you can put in the file: a bundle labeled with exactly the verification tier its declared gate results support.

1Section 16(b) Short-Swing Profit Recomputationrecompute_section16b_profit

The recompute. You declare each transaction's type, date, price, and share count, any exemption flags such as a Rule 16b-3 approved-plan exemption, the insider's officer/director, ten-percent-owner, and foreign-private-issuer status, and the demand letter's claimed profit figure where you have one. The node pairs the lowest-priced eligible purchase against the highest-priced eligible sale, repeatedly, within a 183-day approximation of the statutory less-than-six-months window, skipping any pairing that would produce a loss rather than netting it against a profitable one. A declared exemption removes a transaction from matching without the node independently deciding whether that exemption applies. It also runs an informational Section 16(a)/(b) applicability check, including the HFIAA asymmetry for a foreign private issuer's officers and directors.

2Evidence Bundle Tier Labelerassemble_ocg_evidence_bundle

The evidence bundle. The Stage 1 receipt's execution hash goes in, together with your declaration of which verification gates the receipt has passed, and out comes a shareable bundle stamped OCG-Verify, OCG-Execute, or OCG-Prove, whichever tier those declared results support. The label re-expresses gate outcomes you declare; it re-runs nothing and mints no new trust claim. Its value is honesty in transit: the general counsel, the board, or opposing counsel who receives the bundle sees exactly what has been verified about the receipt, and exactly what has not.

Named follow-on, not built here: a Helm-side watch note that would re-run this pack automatically against a standing Form 4 feed and flag a new short-swing pairing before a demand letter ever arrives. That is a live-data integration outside this pack's zero-network, declared-input design, and it stays a separately-scoped follow-on, not a claim this pack makes about itself.
Reading the Run

Three verdicts, straight from the node

Stage 1 emits this vocabulary itself; it is not a reading rule this page adds. The discipline is in the third word. A recompute with nothing to compare it against is not a quiet pass, and it is not treated as one.

MATCHES
The independently recomputed matched-pair total agrees with the demand letter's claimed profit. The agreement means something because the recompute was derived from the declared transaction list, not copied from the letter, so two independently derived numbers landed on the same figure.
DIVERGES
The recomputed total differs from what the letter claims. The receipt carries every matched pair's own purchase date, sale date, share count, and profit, so the divergence traces to specific pairings rather than a bare disagreement over a bottom-line number.
INDETERMINATE
Either the declared transaction list was empty or produced no usable pairs, or no demand-letter figure was supplied to compare against. Neither case is guessed toward MATCHES or DIVERGES; it is reported as the third state it actually is.
Reading a Receipt

What the receipt says, and what it doesn't

The receipt provesThe receipt does NOT prove
That the declared transaction list, matched under the lowest-in/highest-out construction within the 183-day approximation, produces the recorded matched pairs and total.That the declared transactions happened, on those dates, at those prices. A list assembled to favor either side recomputes exactly as cleanly as a true one.
That a declared exemption was excluded from matching, and that the comparison against the demand letter's claimed figure was computed independently of that figure.That any declared exemption in fact applies, that the insider's officer/director or ten-percent-owner status is correct, or that the six-month boundary's day-count approximation matches true calendar-month arithmetic for a pair near the edge.
That the evidence bundle's tier label matches the gate results declared for the receipt, per the cumulative SIDECAR.1 tiers.That any gate actually passed. The label re-expresses your declaration; a wrong declaration produces a confidently wrong label.
That a third party can replay the same arithmetic from the same declared inputs and reach the same execution_hash.That the underlying Section 16(b) claim is meritorious, that any exemption or matchability dispute is resolved, or that a Rule 144 volume-limitation question has been addressed.
Context

The construction, as a dated observation

Carried from the node itself rather than restated here as a fact of our own. Confirm current statutory and case text with counsel before relying on any of it.

The matching constructiondated observation

As read on 2026-08-07 and carried in art-573: the lowest-in/highest-out construction traces to Smolowe v. Delvag Reinsurance Co., 136 F.2d 231 (2d Cir. 1943), and Gratz v. Claughton, 187 F.2d 46 (2d Cir. 1951), maximizing recovery to the corporation rather than measuring the insider's actual realized gain. It is the widely cited construction, not one this pack re-derived from primary case text at build time, and is named as a research finding needing independent re-verification.

What stays outside the packscope note

A Rule 144 volume-limitation check on any sale is deliberately not in this pack and not in any node it composes; it is a named follow-on tool. The Helm-side watch note described above, an automated re-run against a standing Form 4 feed, is likewise a named follow-on, not a live-data capability this pack claims to have.

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