Latest rules take effect as US SEC updates EDGAR and Filer Manual for 2021Q4
On 20 December 2021, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) upgraded its Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system to Release 21.4. It now supports updated 2021Q4 versions of the SEC’s XBRL taxonomies, which were released for comment in September.
With this release, the Closed-End Fund (CEF) taxonomy will be accepted in EDGAR for the first time, and the Document and Entity Information (DEI) taxonomy has been updated to include new elements for tagging auditor information. The SEC notes that the 2021Q4 version of the DEI taxonomy is only compatible with the 2021 versions of other taxonomies. If it is used in conjunction with the 2020 version of another taxonomy in the same filing, the filing will be suspended – so vendors and issuers take note! In general, the SEC strongly encourages companies to use the most recent taxonomies to take advantage of the most up-to-date tags related to new accounting standards and other improvements.
In addition, on 5 January 2022 the latest version of the EDGAR Filer Manual was officially adopted, reflecting the recent updates to EDGAR in Releases 21.4 and 21.3.1. The amendments to Volume II of the manual, which provides detailed technical guidance on making submissions to EDGAR, cover the CEF and DEI taxonomies, as well as new Filing Fee Disclosure rules requiring users to submit digital data for fee calculation by the SEC, and other changes.
