The recent breach at the SEC illustrates how prevalent internet cyberattacks have become. They are a ubiquitous threat, inherent to the information exchange the internet provides. Often times with little warning or even indication that the event is occurring, hackers can infiltrate secure systems and access nonpublic information that could be exploited or damaging to multiple parties. Particularly when it comes to EDGAR, a great deal of sensitive, private information is regularly exchanged between companies and the SEC. Should this information be accessed before it’s appropriate, it could lead to all sorts of undesirable consequences. Even something as simple as prior knowledge of the type of form a company is in the process of filing can result in unwanted outcomes. Therefore, it’s essential that we as filers, filing agents, and other involved parties protect ourselves from unwanted intrusions.

On September 21st, the SEC approved sets of interpretive guidelines to assist companies in their efforts to comply with the pay ratio disclosure mandate. This mandate comes from Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and companies are required to begin making pay ratio disclosures in early 2018.

Starting as early as next month, accelerated filers will need to comply with new hyperlinking rules adopted by the SEC earlier this year. These form amendments now require companies who file registration statements or reports subject to the exhibit requirements under Item 601 of Regulation S-K or who file Forms F-10 or F-20 to include a hyperlink to each exhibit listed in the filing’s exhibit index. This is intended to make it simpler for investors and other interested parties to locate the exhibits included or referenced in a filing.

XBRL US will be offering a second IFRS Taxonomy Deep Dive Webinar on August 23rd at 3:00 PM EST. This webinar will cover the IFRS Taxonomy and SEC rules requiring foreign private issuers to file their financials in XBRL format.

The XBRL US Center for Data Quality has begun a public review period on July 19th, 2017, for the fifth set of proposed rules to provide guidance and aid for issuers in identifying errors in their XBRL SEC filings. The Data Quality Committee rules aim to help filers limit mistakes and avoid data inconsistencies that can adversely affect analysis of reported financial information.

On August 1, 2017, new rules that require funds to describe their securities lending activities will go into effect.

Through Novaworks Submission Service (NSS), it’s possible to automatically schedule filings. This is an extremely handy tool to help streamline your submission process, as not only can you prepare your filing in advance, you can also have GoFiler send it to the SEC for you and notify you and your production team of the filing’s status.

In March, the SEC introduced proposed changes to include Inline XBRL Tagging in financial filings. We covered these proposed amendments in this blog post. The public comment period recently ended on May 16th, and the comments are available to read here. XBRL US offered one such comment on the proposed requirements to include Inline XBRL in financial filings, and in it expressed agreement that inclusion on Inline XBRL will help to improve the quality of reported structured financial data while reducing the burden on filers.

Every year, FASB releases a new version of the US GAAP XBRL taxonomy. Depending on the individual filer, adopting this new taxonomy can be easy or potentially require a fair amount of work. While FASB does have release notes for the taxonomy, there is little guidance on how to adopt the new changes. In this blog, we will be going over what can change in a taxonomy update, how to identify those changes, and how to determine what, if anything, needs to be done to your filing to incorporate the changes.

Many EDGAR filing forms have fees associated with them. Determining the fee associated with a filing is extremely important and can be straightforward. However, there are times when the calculation can also become more complicated. Fee offsets can be a source of confusion for many filers and our support team often gets asked questions about how to prepare an EDGAR filing when fee offsets are involved.

The SEC voted on March 1, 2017 to adopt rule and form amendments to make it easier for investors and other market participants to locate and access exhibits in registration statements and periodic reports that were originally submitted with prior filings. This ruling requires issuers to include a hyperlink to each exhibit in the filing’s exhibit index.

With the changing pace of technology, companies like Microsoft need to be vigilant about security issues. Every office has experienced it – that one user that gets a virus and the whole office becomes infected in a matter of minutes. To combat this problem Microsoft has started to force computers to update automatically. Gone are the days of Windows XP where users could continue to hit “Postpone” for weeks on end. Now we have the new Windows Update that installs and restarts your computer for you. Instead of coming into work to a virus attack, users are now unfortunately coming into work to find their documents and applications closed and their computers restarted.

The next N-MFP filing due for money market funds must be submitted to the EDGAR System on the new form, Form N-MFP2. This new version of the form became effective on October 14, 2016.