On December 1, the staff of the SEC announced that, effective January 1, 2012, it will begin releasing through the EDGAR system comment letters and response letters relating to disclosure filings reviewed by the Divisions of Corporation Finance and Investment Management no earlier than 20 business days following the completion of a filing review. Previously, since May 2005, the stated goal of the staff had been to release the correspondence no earlier than 45 days after completion of a review. A link to the staff's statement can be found here.
This change serves as a useful reminder that competitors, customers, stockholders, bondholders and others can easily view a company's responses to staff comments on the SEC's website. There is a process available for requesting that the staff keep limited portions of a response letter confidential by submitting those responses to the staff supplementally, but nevertheless the SEC comments and most of the responses will remain publicly available.
The acceleration of the availability of SEC comments and company responses is part of the SEC's ongoing process to enhance the transparency of the filing review process. For example, the staff recently announced that it was severely limiting the availability of a nonpublic review process for foreign private issuers. A link to our memo on that announcement can be found here.
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