The SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee will hold a meeting on July 25 at 9 a.m. EST. This committee was established to advise the SEC on regulatory priorities and issues, including the regulation of securities products, trading strategies, fee structures, the effectiveness of disclosure, and initiatives to protect investor interests and promote investor confidence. Members of the committee represent a wide variety of investors, from individual and institutional investors to senior citizens and state securities commissions.

The SEC’s Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee will hold a meeting on August 13. This meeting will begin at 9:30 a.m. CST (10:30 a.m. EST) and will be conducted at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. It is freely open to the public, but there is limited seating availability. In addition, the meeting will be webcast live on the SEC’s website and archived for later viewing. The full agenda for the meeting will be announced at a later date.

XBRL US has posted a helpful Q&A on the new Inline XBRL (iXBRL) Cover Page tagging requirements for SEC filings.

The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance will be hosting a roundtable on July 18th at the SEC’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. This roundtable will allow investors, issuers, and other market participants to speak about the impact of short-termism on capital markets and whether the SEC’s reporting system (or other aspects of the SEC’s regulatory approaches) should be modified to address these concerns.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is revising its electronic filing format for particular data collections to make it easier for filers to submit information and for data analyzers to use that information. This new rule, which was passed June 20, 2019, will modernize FERC’s data collection, which will in turn increase efficiency in regulatory filings and business information processing while furthering transparency and over time decreasing costs in preparing the data for submission.

SEC Chairman Jay Clayton announced that the SEC will hold two events for Main Street investors in Boston on Monday, July 8th. The first event is a roundtable hosted by Chairman Clayton with Main Street Investors that will focus on the SEC’s ongoing investor education efforts. The roundtable will explore issues relevant to Main Street investors, such as understanding important differences between investment advisers and broker-dealers. Other senior SEC staff will join the event.

On June 18th, the SEC adopted changes to the auditor independence rules with respect to the mandated analysis to determine if an auditor is independent when said auditor has a lending relationship with shareholders of an audit client. These changes were prompted by situations where existing rules capture relationships that otherwise do not bear on the impartiality and/or objectivity of the auditor. The amendments are designed to refine these rules to better focus on lending relationships that may reasonably influence an external auditor’s impartiality/objectivity. In doing so, the changes should improve the application of the Loan Provision to the benefit of investors while reducing compliance burdens.

The SEC has requested public comment on way to simplify and improve the exempt offering framework with the goal of expanding investment opportunities and promoting capital formation while maintaining appropriate investor protections. The Concept Release on Harmonization of Securities Offering Exemptions reviews the framework for exempt offerings, including several exemptions from registration under the Securities Act of 1933 that facilitate capital raising.

On June 10, 2019, the SEC updated its list of unregistered entities that use misleading information to solicit primarily non-US investors, adding 11 soliciting entities, four impersonators of genuine firms, and nine bogus regulators.

With compliance dates approaching, reviewing the SEC’s mandate for operating companies and funds that they report their financial information in Inline XBRL (iXBRL) is important. These requirements date back to June 2018, when the SEC passed rules seeking to modernize and simplify financial reporting for these filers. Unlike traditional XBRL which produces a XML document containing only tagged, structured data that is difficult for a human reader to understand and interpret, iXBRL involves embedding XBRL data directly into an HTML filing so that the disclosure document is both human-readable as a formatted report of financial information and machine-readable since the tagged data can be collected and used in subsequent analyses in any number of ways. Using iXBRL improves the data’s usefulness, timeliness, and quality, which benefits investors, regulators, market participants, and other data consumers. Inline XBRL also reduces burdens and complexity to registrants and preparers as only one document containing both the formatted report and the structured data must be produced.