Tuesday, July 26, 2016

When the SEC has questions or problems with a company’s filing, it sends a ‘comment’ letter (often times including insightful information), to which the company must then respond. At least 20 days after this review is concluded, the correspondence becomes public. The letters are posted to EDGAR, using document types “UPLOAD” for the letters, and “CORRESP” for the responses.

These letters, however, are a bit hard to find and difficult to follow along in sequence.

Problem solved! You can now read these full correspondence chains using our interactive disclosure tool.

1) Pick a company.

2) Hit the ‘All History’ button near the top right of your screen.

3) Scroll to “SEC Comment Letters & Responses”

Now you can read along each chain in order.

Why should you care?

For investors this can be critical information. Here’s a recent example, involving Yahoo’s search agreement with Mozilla. That agreement was excluded from company filings, but turned out to be important during the company’s sale.

More here from last week’s New York Times:

“Yahoo decided the contract’s provisions were not significant enough to disclose to shareholders, despite a series of letters last year from the Securities and Exchange Commission asking the company to lay out the terms of the agreement and the risks to Yahoo. A spokeswoman for the agency declined to comment on the dispute.”

In other words, if you hadn’t read the letters, you wouldn’t have known….

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