SEC Info - Help
Corrections↓ – Deletions↓ – Redactions↓ – Social Security Numbers↓ – SSNs and Search Engines↓
Background: The information that is on our site is published here after it was first filed at and disclosed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) pursuant to Federal law. SEC Filings, made by Filers or Filing Agents who are SEC Registrants, come to us from the SEC at the time they are filed, and are forever in the “public domain” as a result of being filed. We publish the names of the Filer(s), Issuer and Filing Agent at the top of each Document, along with the SEC File # containing the Filing. This information can be used to obtain an SEC-Certified Attestation as to its authenticity, which can be used to cross-check the contents of the Filing and its Document(s) as they are rendered on our site. For example, this SEC-Certified Attestation attests to the authenticity of the contents of this Filing.
Corrections: If it’s a correction to your Registrant information (as a Filer, Issuer or Filing Agent), such as your name / address / phone number, or some Filing-specific piece of information (in the Submission metadata), you or your Filing Agent must directly contact EDGAR Filer Support (at
+1 202-551-8900) and ask the SEC to correct the information in their official databases. We (SEC Info – this Web site) are not the SEC. We therefore cannot, pursuant to SEC Rules & Regulations, change their databases for you. If the SEC does correct any Submission metadata, such as a “Filed as of” or an “Effective on” date, we will note that at the top of each Document/Exhibit in the Filing. We faithfully publish everything exactly as processed by the EDGAR Internet Site Subsystem and transmitted by the EDGAR Public Dissemination Service (PDS), so any metadata correction made by the SEC will automatically get reflected in our database, whether or not you requested the correction, provided that the change is disseminated by the PDS to Web sites like ours and the SEC’s. Since the SEC’s site is a peer site to ours, changes to the SEC’s site that are simply made by its Webmasters will not get disseminated to us, because their Web site is not the PDS. SEC employees manage their Web site, but the PDS is operated separately under contract by a private-sector company. (SEC metadata “Corrections” are different than Filing “Deletions↓”.)Deletions: SEC Filings are forever in the “public domain” once they are filed and disseminated, whether via paper or electronically, even if the SEC subsequently deletes them from its own Web site. More precisely, it is the information in them that is forever in the public domain. For many reasons, ranging from public policy to practical considerations, there is no Federal or State law, rule or regulation that does or even could mandate the absolute deletion of SEC Filings or any of their contents. Since Filings are basically collections of information, where the Filing’s computer file is just the delivery package, any effort to delete that delivery package is meaningless after the information in it has been sliced & diced and copied into various formats and representations by us and others and made public. As such, an EDGAR “deletion notice” is informational only, simply communicating that the SEC does not consider the Filing valid from a securities-law perspective, so some sites ignore it and others don’t. The SEC makes clear the concept of “Filer beware” with respect to this — ask any Filing Agent. It is also important to recognize that the EDGAR System operates independently of and separately from all Web sites, whether it’s the SEC’s own site or ours or any others (including search engines), so each site has to establish its own policy with respect to deletions. Our policy is that any deletion designation made by the EDGAR System will be noted in, but not reflected in, our database, and noted at the top of each Document/Exhibit in the Filing. Therefore, our site may be the only functional one that provides a complete history of everything that has been filed. As a technical matter, deleting something from our system would “break” it, resulting in broken links and “not found” errors, so we don’t delete anything because of our unique cross-linking complexity. Even if we could delete a Filing’s computer file just like the SEC site and other simple sites do, copies of it would still be in the caches of the dozens of search engines that archive our site. (We can’t do Filing “Deletions”, but we can do text “Redactions↓”.)
Redactions: In compliance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003, this is our change-request process... We cannot delete filings (see Deletions↑), but we may redact (“black out”) text in certain situations. If an SEC Filing contains sensitive or personal information, such as Social Security Numbers (see SSNs↓), we may redact that information for a fee. We charge for this service because it involves a lot of work, due to the complexity of our system, which you will understand if you are a frequent user of our site. The architecture of our system, beginning in 1996 when we started designing it, is predicated upon the fact that SEC Filings contain “static” Documents and Exhibits that are placed in the public domain (see Deletions↑), just as books, newspapers and paper documents are static. It is their static nature that allows our parsing, database, indexing, and rendering software to add our billions of unique and useful intra- and inter-Document links. Although you may only see a data item in the HTML version that the search engines index, it actually also exists in a dozen other places that we must find and redact it from. Each Redaction Request therefore requires hours (or weeks, in the case of very large projects) of manual research and meticulous work to complete the redaction process. We will manually change all of the basic and alternative formats that we have for each Document or Exhibit (besides the .html file, there may be .txt, .pdf, .rtf, .doc, .csv, .xls, .xml, .xbrl, .sgml, et al. files), plus all relevant database entries and internal search engine indexes. Any redactions that we make will be noted for the dozens of search engines that index our site, as described below. Redactions are usually made for the Filer or its/his/her agent (officer, attorney or Filing Agent), because other parties have no “legal standing” to affect changes to a Filer’s Filings, even if they are referenced therein, but we may make exceptions. The Filer or Filing Agent usually pays the cost of a redaction, since they made the original Filing. Our price is $50 for each Registrant/Filer searched, and it covers the first item changed within an individual Document or Exhibit of that Registrant, with further changes within that document or in others priced on a declining scale. The price to be negotiated will depend upon the amount of work involved, which we will determine after you submit a request describing what you want done. To make an online Redaction Request, click here to use our Redaction Request page, not the Form up above.
Social Security Numbers (SSNs): SEC Filings (meaning their contents, including SSNs) are filed pursuant to Federal securities laws in effect when the Filings are made and placed in the public domain (see Deletions↑). SEC Filers have been making such “full disclosure” Filings per SEC Rules & Regulations since 1933. But even though the disclosure of SSNs has been mandated (see “S.S. or I.R.S. Identification No.” in a ‘Schedule 13G’), encouraged (see “IRS Ident. No.” in a ‘Form 144’), voluntary (see “Social Security Number... (Voluntary)” in a ‘Form 3’) or allowed (see “Tax Identification #” in a ‘Proxy Statement’), we began redacting them upon request (see Redactions↑) in June 2006, a full year before the SEC changed its policy. SSNs in Filings made after June 2007 were and are now automatically redacted by the SEC and us, but only if they are formatted in the hyphenated
3-2-4 style (###–##–####) and not as just nine digits. (We are proud to note that when the SEC updated its system, it copied our redaction procedure of replacing SSNs with “###–##–####”.) Because the SEC only dealt with that 3-2-4 format (and did so erroneously as a quick & dirty “fix”, since fewer than 22% of any “numbers” in that format are indeed SSNs — we’ve verified this with the SSA and IRS), there remain many thousands of SSNs on the SEC’s site that have yet to be redacted. But even when any are redacted on the SEC’s site, there is no way to communicate these changes via the EDGAR Public Dissemination Service (see Corrections↑). So, if you have found an SSN on our site, it is because the SEC Form or Document/Exhibit that was filed before June 2007 either required or allowed the disclosure of the SSN at the time it was filed, pursuant to Federal securities laws as implemented by the SEC and adhered to by the Filer. Although some States have passed laws with respect to SSNs, those laws always defer to Federal law so that there is no conflict. To quote California Civil Law as an example, it “... does not prevent the collection, use, or release of a social security number as required by state or federal law...”. Our site therefore renders SEC Filings exactly as they were filed, in conformance with over-riding Federal law and the original intent of the Filer, unless we’ve processed an online Redaction Request (see Redactions↑). Please understand that we have no way of knowing that an SSN is on our site unless you tell us. Any nine-digit number on our site could actually be a CUSIP Issue Number, US IRS TIN (EIN, SSN or ITIN), Canadian CRA SIN, SEC File Number, US UCC-1 Loan Number and/or an international phone number (just some of the many interpretations we know of), and there are no validity-checking algorithms anywhere that can be used automatically to guarantee a distinct and therefore correct interpretation of it. For example, if you search for the number 594-91-8104 which exists on our site, the various validity-checking algorithms say it is equally valid as a possible CUSIP Issue Number (for an equity security), US IRS EIN (assigned in Brookhaven, NY), US IRS SSN (assigned randomly), Canadian CRA SIN (assigned in Ontario) and US UCC-1 Loan Number. Our site contains more than 60 million numbers that individually pass multiple validity checks like that, and over 1.2 million numbers that pass all interpretations we check for. Further complicating things, a sole proprietor with employees could disclose an SSN as an EIN. So, it is impossible for us or anyone to know if any nine-digit number is an SSN.
SSNs and Search Engines: If you found an SSN on our site by using a search engine,
it is probably also on the other sites that subscribe to the EDGAR Public Dissemination Service,
but you may not realize it nor find those other sites.
The reason you may have found the SSN only on our site and not on those other sites is
because the search engines index our site much more than they do those sites,
due to the billions of unique links that our software has added to the static Filings.
Those links make us the best SEC-Filing research site, and as a side-effect
allow search engines to “dig deeper” when crawling and indexing our pages. (See
Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes, and serves the Web
for a description of why.)
So, there is an incredible irony here: You may be upset that you found your SSN on our site,
but if we were not so good as to be so deeply indexed by the search engines,
you may never have discovered that your SSN was filed at the SEC and placed in the public domain.
Many wise people have thanked us for enabling them to know that this has happened.
They understand that we have no way of knowing that their SSN
is buried somewhere in the 500+ million pages on our site,
any more than the search engine companies would know that they have indexed their SSN.
Redacting an SSN from our site will cause it to automatically be removed from the search engines,
because we interface with the search engines
(Google, Microsoft’s Bing, 