Investors and regulators are taking a closer look at companies that miss deadlines for reporting executive stock option grants, in what may be a new phase in the U.S. option-timing scandal.

On Nov. 1, shareholder Erik Henne filed a derivative lawsuit against directors and executives of Digital River, a Minnesota-based Internet-commerce firm. The suit, which accuses the company of backdating options to maximize executive pay, claims that CEO Joel Ronning and two other executives have never filed Form 4 reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission on grants made in 2003, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Two other executives waited until this year to report their 2003 option grants, the lawsuit contends.

Bob Kleiber, Digital River's vice president of investor relations, told Dow Jones last month that the late filings were an "oversight," but he said the company had accurately reported grant dates.

Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in August 2002, companies have been required to report option grants within two business days. While this rule change has made it more difficult for companies to manipulate grant dates, a significant number of firms have missed these deadlines, raising concerns among some investors that option-timing is still occurring.

Erik Lie, a finance professor at the University of Iowa who has written several papers on option grants, estimates that 13 percent of option reports last year were filed late. "Among those grants, the prevalence of backdating and other manipulation appears to be just as big as it was before 2002," Lie said at an ISS forum in July.

The Digital River investor's lawsuit also questioned the company's schedule for grants; the firm awarded grants in six different months between 1999 and 2004, according to the Star Tribune. Investors, including the AFL-CIO, have called on firms to set a fixed grant date each year to reduce the possibility for manipulation.

More than a half-dozen firms are facing investor scrutiny over their Form 4 filings for option grants. Among those are Hansen Natural, Children's Place Retail Stores, and Silicon Image, which have announced internal and SEC investigations of their option grant practices.

Overall, more than 175 companies have disclosed internal or regulatory probes into past grants, Bloomberg News reported. More than 95 issuers now face derivative lawsuits, according to The D&O Diary, a Web log maintained by Kevin LaCroix, an attorney with OakBridge Insurance Services. Twenty of those firms are defendants in securities class-action lawsuits, according to ISS Securities Class Action Services data.

John Nester, a spokesman for the SEC, told the San Jose Mercury News that the agency "will continue to monitor whether backdating appears to be occurring in conjunction with delinquent Form 4 filings. Where appropriate, enforcement actions will follow."

Edward Bright, a partner with the law firm of Thacher Proffitt & Wood, notes that some firms will miss deadlines because of a high volume of Form 4 filings. "A fair argument can be made in the case of occasional late filings that they are the result of inadvertence or something falling through the cracks," Bright told Compliance Week. "But if a company is chronically late with respect to options and not other transactions, it raises a legitimate question."