It’s a question to which even filing experts may not know the answer. It doesn’t happen often, but the dreaded Internet error can cause major problems when you are in the middle of a Live filing. What do you do? How can you know if the SEC received the filing? This blog post will help you figure out the best course of action.

As the deadline for the first Form N-MFP1 filing draws closer, it’s important to know what your options are for working with this new type of filing. As with Form N-MFP, the SEC is not providing any editing software so filers are essentially on their own to find a solution for creating and editing this form.

SEC staff recently released observations regarding registrants’ use of custom axis elements (or custom dimensions) in XBRL reports. The results of their analysis showed that while the overall use of custom axis elements has been declining since 2013, over half of all filers continue to use one or more custom axis elements in their annual reports.

When the SEC moved their XBRL Viewer software to Python, the underlying architecture of the application changed significantly and now requires a bit more set up to get the software up and running. If you use GoFiler Complete or GoXBRL, our development team has integrated a script into our software to automatically install the XBRL Viewer for you. If you want to know how to install the XBRL Viewer on your own, read on.

The SEC’s changes to Form N-MFP will take effect on April 14, 2016. After this date, filers will need to submit new Form N-MFP1, which contains additional fields and has some other minor changes.

On February 9, 2016, SEC staff released a guide for issuers of Asset-Backed Securities to help issuers understand the procedures for using EDGAR. The guide answers questions about filing a 424H prospectus, filing Form ABS-15G, and filing other forms that may be an initial filing for an ABS issuing entity.

As Novaworks has released new versions our software throughout the years, our support team frequently are asked about the Office of Management and Budget (or “OMB”) date that appears on the proof for certain forms. This OMB information changes periodically, and, while it isn’t filed to EDGAR with your form data, it has raised questions from filers about what the OMB information is and why it doesn’t always appear up to date.

The Section 16 EDGAR forms are fairly straightforward for filers and preparers, but sometimes you can run into something a little out of the ordinary and have questions about how to file it. We’ve compiled a list of the five most common questions our support team is asked about Section 16 to help you confidently prepare the more unusual Section 16 filings.

With the release of EDGAR 15.4, filers will be able to file Part III of Form X-17A-5 electronically. Form X-17A-5 contains information required of broker-dealers pursuant to Section 17 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Granted, it’s not the first thing you rush to do when there’s a change with the contact information at your company, but keeping the SEC abreast of such changes is an important task that often gets overlooked. The contact information you or your company has provided to the EDGAR System is what the SEC staff uses to communicate with you about the status of your filings. If this information is not up to date, there could be an unnecessary delay while the SEC attempts to find a way to contact you or someone at your company who is knowledgeable about your EDGAR filings.

The SEC made a few changes to their EDGAR Renderer (XBRL Viewer) and quietly released version 3.3 in the beginning of November. Most of the changes are improvements and address issues that were introduced with the previous release of the software.

Schedule 13D and Schedule 13G are similar forms that are used to report a party’s ownership of stock that is over 5% of a class of equity in a company. Because ownership of over 5% in a public company is significant ownership, you must declare it to the public. When you should file each of these schedules depends on additional criteria.

The Novaworks support team frequently receives queries about images missing from SEC test filings or text being incorrectly positioned in areas such as prospectus cover pages when a submission is sent with the “return copy” option enabled, so we've provided a quick lesson on what the return copy is and how to use it.

Sending a correspondence to the SEC via EDGAR can raise questions about how to prepare the filing and how it should be filed. Unlike other information sent to EDGAR, a correspondence can be included as either an exhibit to a filing or it can be transmitted as a separate filing altogether using Form CORRESP.

The SEC announced that along with EDGAR 15.3, they would also be rolling out some SSL changes. The SEC will remove support for SSLv3 from their server, requiring all EDGAR filers to use the TLSv1.0 protocol. For the average filer, “SSL” and “TLS” may be completely foreign terms. You might be wondering: “What is SSL?” and “Does this affect my EDGAR filings?”. To know what the SSL changes mean at the SEC for your company, you’ll first have to take a short trip into the land of Internet security.