AT&T Inc. and three of its executives were hit with an unusual lawsuit by federal regulators claiming that they selectively disclosed nonpublic information about the company's finances to Wall Street analysts. The suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is a rare claim that a company violated Regulation FD, failing to disseminate material information widely.

Filed Friday in federal court in New York, the complaint alleges that in early March 2016 the company and executives Christopher C. Womack, Kent D. Evans, and Michael J. Black learned that first-quarter revenue was expected to fall short of analyst estimates because of a larger-than-expected decline in smartphone sales. So the three made private calls to analysts at about 20 firms, disclosing information that included internal sales data and the impact on revenue, according to the SEC.

The analysts then reduced their revenue forecasts, the agency said. It said the point of the calls was to avoid a revenue miss for the company. According to the SEC, the object of the phone calls was to get enough analysts to reduce forecasts that the consensus revenue estimate would decline to the level AT&T expected to report to the public. That way, the company wouldn't have a revenue miss, which would have been its third quarterly miss in a row, the agency said.