On December 18th, the SEC released a request for comments concerning the nature, content, and timing of earnings releases and quarterly reports made by reporting companies. The SEC is soliciting public input on how it can reduce burdens on reporting companies associated with quarterly reporting while maintaining or enhancing disclosure effectiveness and investor protections. The Commission is also investigating how the current periodic reporting system, earnings releases, and earnings guidance may create an overly short-term focus on the part of managers and other market participants. This evaluation of the existing system is driven by a need to foster more long-term investments.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has adopted rules to allow reporting companies to use the Regulation A exemption from registration. Regulation A provides an exemption from registration under the Securities Act of 1933 for offerings of securities up to $50 million in a 12-month period and was previously not available to companies that are Exchange Act reporting companies. The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act that was enacted earlier this year requires the SEC to adopt this change and allow reporting companies to use Regulation A.

On December 18th, the SEC adopted final rules to require companies to disclose hedging practices or policies in any proxy statement or information statement relating to the election of directors. These disclosures involve any practices or policies regarding the ability of employees or directors to engage in certain hedging transactions with respect to company equity securities. The rules implement Section 14(j) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which was enacted by Section 955 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

On December 17, 2018, EDGAR Release 18.4 - Phase 1 was released by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This release contains new Form ATS-N and changes were made to a number of other EDGAR forms to remove fields that ask for personally identifying information. Additional updates were also made to some Regulation A forms and to the EDGAR filer manuals.

Last month, XBRL US introduced a free application program interface (API) standard as a Proposed Release. The API is designed to help programmers create, extract, and analyze XBRL formatted data. It is meant to be a standard that acts as a software intermediary, allowing applications to communicate with one another. Investors and analysts alike can use the XBRL API to gain access to and manipulate XBRL data, both historical data and data that is up-to-date. The API will work with any XBRL database or taxonomy.

On December 6th, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation released the IFRS Taxonomy 2018 – Proposed Update 2 General Improvements.

On November 30th, the SEC adopted rules and amendments designed to promote research on mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, business development companies, and similar covered investment funds. The SEC enacted these changes in accordance with the mandate in the Fair Access to Investment Research (FAIR) Act of 2017. The new rules will reduce obstacles in providing fund research by harmonizing its treatment with other research on public companies and generally establish a safe harbor for a broker or dealer to publish and/or distribute research reports on investment funds under certain conditions.

The SEC published a list of rules that it will review in compliance with Section 610 of the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA). This is to inform the public that this set of rules is scheduled for review and to invite public comment concerning if these rules should be continued without change, should be amended, or should be rescinded to minimize any significant economic impact of the rules upon a substantial number of small reporting entities.

The EDGAR system will be closed Wednesday, December 5 in observance of a national day of mourning for former President George H.W. Bush. The EDGAR System will not receive, process or accept filings on this day. The EDGAR Filing Website will not be operational and Filer Support will not be open.

The SEC’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (DERA) recently analyzed XBRL exhibits submitted by issuers complying with the 2009 Interactive Data rules to file financial statement information in an XBRL format. The purpose of the analysis was to determine if IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) filers were being consistent with their use of custom tags with US-GAAP (US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) filers during this first year of required XBRL filings.