By Evan Condran, CPA, POPM, Director of Product Management
Dated March 20, 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted amendments to the FAST Act Modernization and Simplification of Regulation S-K as an initiative to reduce cost and burden for registrants while still providing essential disclosure information for investors.
A notable inclusion in the final rule is the expansion of XBRL tagging, a machine-readable language, to SEC Form 8-K. Registrants will be required to XBRL tag all the cover page information to Form 8-K and expand the existing tagging requirements to all cover page information for Form 10-Q, 10-K, 20-F and 40-F, which up until now have only been partially tagged.
Further, the final rule follows the same phase-in as the Inline XBRL requirement which became effective during the 3rd quarter of 2018. The phase-in calls for registrants to file Form 8-K in Inline XBRL format starting with Large Accelerated Filers filing in US GAAP for reports with fiscal periods ending on or after June 15, 2019.
Registrants are required to file an 8-K to the SEC within four business days of a material unscheduled event such as announcing the completion of an acquisition. The Form 8-K is intended to provide investors with timely, accurate, and important information related to the registrant’s business and operations. Until now, registrants would only be required to file an 8-K in HTML format. Providing an 8-K in Inline XBRL format facilitates data analysis by making the data available in machine-readable format that can be consumed and analyzed using various software tools.
For more information on how Certent can ensure compliance for your company, contact our team today.
