In October, the SEC will implement changes to money market fund rules and forms. These changes concern the removal of certain references to credit ratings as well as amendments to the issuer diversification requirements. These changes were initially proposed in March 2011 and proposed a second time in July 2014, and implementing them will bring rule 2a-7, the principal rule that governs money market funds, and Form N-MFP, the form that money markets use to report their portfolios to the SEC, into alignment with the provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act.

In XBRL as in other data reporting systems, calculations show relationships among data. Since XBRL defines calculations in this way without validating the accuracy of their results, it is important to examine the results of calculations in XBRL filings. Many preparers may assume that when a calculation does not add up, it is due to rounding, but this may not be a safe assumption.

The XBRL US Center for Data Quality has launched a public review for five new proposed validation rules. Additionally, the Data Quality Committee (DQC) has released proposed additions to the previous rule regarding inappropriate negative values.

Rule 13q-1, which requires resource extractions issuers to disclose payments made to foreign governments, was adopted by the SEC on June 27, 2016. This rule was initially adopted in August 2012 but was vacated by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Since then, several other entities adopted transparency rules that are similar to Rule 13q-1, and the SEC re-proposed the rules for the payment disclosures back in December of last year. Now, the rule has been finalized and resource extraction issuers will be required to disclose the payments in XBRL format using Form SD starting with their fiscal year ending no earlier than September 30, 2018.

The SEC has proposed amendments that would increase the financial thresholds in the “smaller reporting company” definition. This would expand the number of companies that qualify for this category, which would make more companies eligible for certain existing scaled disclosures as provided in Regulation S-K and Regulation S-X. The intention is to promote capital formation and reduce compliance costs for smaller registrants while maintaining investor protections. Under the new definition, registrants with less than $250 million in public float and registrants with zero public float if their revenues were below $100 million in the previous year would both qualify as smaller reporting companies.