On July 17, 2017, EDGAR 17.2 was released by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This release contained changes that added new fields to a number of forms that designate whether a registrant is an Emerging Growth Company and to inform the SEC as to whether the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards. Other changes affect a number of forms, including Form D, Form CFPortal, Form 17HACON, and the exhibit document for Form ABS-EE.

On August 1, 2017, new rules that require funds to describe their securities lending activities will go into effect.

On June 29, 2017, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance announced that it will permit all companies to submit draft registration statements relating to initial public offerings for review on a non-public basis. In addition to IPOs, this process will be available to most other offerings made during a company’s first year after entering the public reporting system.

On June 20th, 2017, the Securities and Exchange Commission named Robert Evans III as the Deputy Director in the Division of Corporation Finance.

Through Novaworks Submission Service (NSS), it’s possible to automatically schedule filings. This is an extremely handy tool to help streamline your submission process, as not only can you prepare your filing in advance, you can also have GoFiler send it to the SEC for you and notify you and your production team of the filing’s status.

In March, the SEC introduced proposed changes to include Inline XBRL Tagging in financial filings. We covered these proposed amendments in this blog post. The public comment period recently ended on May 16th, and the comments are available to read here. XBRL US offered one such comment on the proposed requirements to include Inline XBRL in financial filings, and in it expressed agreement that inclusion on Inline XBRL will help to improve the quality of reported structured financial data while reducing the burden on filers.

On Thursday, June 8th, the House of Representatives passed the Financial Creating Hope and Opportunity for Investors, Consumers, and Entrepreneurs Act (the Financial CHOICE Act) along mostly partisan lines. This act would reverse or change many of the reforms of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was passed into law in 2010 in response to the financial issues seen in the Great Recession.

Filers must comply with the amendments to the registration form used by open-end funds (Form N-1A) that require funds to describe their procedures for redeeming fund shares starting today, June 1, 2017.

Starting on July 4, 2017, the fee rates applicable to most securities transactions will be set at $23.10 per million dollars. Each SRO will continue to pay the SEC a rate of $21.80 per million for covered sales occurring on charge dates through July 3, 2017, and a rate of $23.10 per million for covered sales occurring on charge dates on or after July 4, 2017.

The SEC has proposed amendments to the definition of a venture capital fund and the private fund adviser exemption under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 in order to reflect changes made by the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act) of 2015.

XBRL US has started a 90-day public exposure period for the XBRL US Style Guide, which was recently revised, updated, and released by the XBRL US Domain Steering Committee. The comment period began on April 17th and continues through July 17th. The Domain Steering Committee intends for the Style Guide to facilitate the creation of consistent, high-quality XBRL taxonomies by providing uniform guidelines and recommendations.

Rules previously adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission to facilitate intrastate and regional securities offerings went into effect on April 20th. Specifically, revised Rule 147 and new Rule 147A became effective on this date.

Every year, FASB releases a new version of the US GAAP XBRL taxonomy. Depending on the individual filer, adopting this new taxonomy can be easy or potentially require a fair amount of work. While FASB does have release notes for the taxonomy, there is little guidance on how to adopt the new changes. In this blog, we will be going over what can change in a taxonomy update, how to identify those changes, and how to determine what, if anything, needs to be done to your filing to incorporate the changes.

The SEC has opened registration for its compliance outreach seminars for investment companies and investment advisers. Seminars are being held in four different cities around the country in May and June.