TheCorporateCounsel.net

If you were perusing filings on EDGAR yesterday as I was, you no doubt found that, when you pulled up some filings, the screen was blank and no information was presented. It seemed evident that the filing was there on EDGAR, but you just could not see it. The SEC IT Staff was on top of this issue quickly and issued a statement acknowledging that EDGAR was experiencing a technical issue displaying certain iXBRL files, and they provided instructions for a work-around to access the filings. The notice indicated that the Staff expected to have the problem fixed by 6:00 am this morning, but I am still encountering the message “An Error has occurred within the Inline XBRL Viewer” when trying to access some filings.

It dawned on me as my frustration grew trying to access filings yesterday that I should really be more grateful for EDGAR. It is a tool that I use almost every day that usually works pretty flawlessly. Despite the onslaught of iXBRL, which makes using EDGAR even more wonky than ever, it does get the job done on a technology platform that appears to be straight out of the 1990s. I can certainly say that having started practicing at the dawn of EDGAR when we accessed ASCII-formatted filings internally at the SEC using our huge PCs running the OS/2 operating system (remember that?), EDGAR has really come a long way. So, I will take a deep breath and wait for the SEC IT Staff to sort out this latest glitch and not be so critical of my old friend EDGAR.

– Dave Lynn