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Contact SEC Info Via This Help Page

Please read this, so that you don’t waste your time:  This website (SEC Info, a service of Fran Finnegan & Company LLC) is an information service for accessing public SEC Filings, so your questions will be ignored unless they pertain specifically to SEC Info.  We simply publish SEC Filings, filed by companies, institutions and individuals, as our service.  We are not the SEC nor some company whose public SEC Filings you may have found here.  If you are trying to contact the SEC, click here, or if you are trying to contact a particular company whose Filings we’ve published, you must contact it elsewhere.  If you can’t find a document on our site, you may request assistance directly from the SEC by submitting an SEC Document RequestWe are not in the business of doing research for you, unless you are willing to pay us, so we will not otherwise reply to a research request.  Our site is available so that you can do your own research, so our Answers to Frequently Asked Questions↓ may help you.  If your questions pertain to having a business relationship with us, such as buying data or using one of our Other Services, please use this Form.  Thank you.
Replies:  We reply to e-mail in this order:  (1) signed-up subscribers, then (2) signed-up users.

The “Question/Request Submittal Form” will appear here after you Sign In.


Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q What is your Privacy Policy?Next  Previous
A:  Our Privacy Policy...

User Info:  Anything that is submitted to us by a user from any page within our site (such as a user’s name, e-mail address, password, phone number or new-Filing notification request) is kept confidential and is not sold nor disclosed to any other party, unless we are required by law to disclose it.  Users can update their information online at any time.  Any information we receive from Google or
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is also kept confidential and is not disclosed.  We use Web “cookies” only to manage users’ sessions, and we do not store any “personally identifiable information” in them.

SEC Info:  Information that has been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and has been disseminated or made publicly available by them, is historic “public domain” information, since one of their organizational functions is to mandate “full disclosure” within the securities markets that they regulate.  Without any human intervention, our software processes and re-publishes this public information, which may contain all categories of “personally identifiable information” as originally disclosed by Filers and the SEC pursuant to Federal securities laws.  If there is anything that you consider “private” on our site which you want removed, such as a Social Security Number↓, see our Change Policy↓ for instructions on how to request Redactions↓.

Legal Info:  This has been our policy, more or less, since 1997.  It is in conformance with the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003.  If we change our policy, we’ll update this page.

Q How can I start receiving e-mail notices of new Filings?Next  Previous
A:  1:  If you have not signed up for our service, you must first Sign Up as a New User.
2:  Once signed up, if you are not signed in, you must Sign In with your e-mail address.
3:  Once signed in, search (from either our Home page or our Search page) for the company, institution or individual that you want to receive new-Filing notifications for.  On the search-results page, find the name of the U.S.-filing Registrant that you are interested in, and click on it so that you go to their Registrant page.
4:  In the Filings section of their Registrant page, there is a checkbox next to “New-Filing E-Mails” which you toggle to turn on, or off, new-Filing notifications for all Filings involving that single Registrant.  For example, click here to see the checkbox in the Filings section of Microsoft’s Registrant page.
5:  Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each Registrant you are interested in.
6:  If you want notifications for particular Filing/Form Types for all Registrants, request them by going to your User Info page and clicking on the My New-Filing E-Mail Notifications (by Filing/Form Types) link.

Note:  Your e-mail reader / system / service must be configured to accept mail from SEC Info (sender “Anonymous” @ domain “secinfo.com”, via e-mail server “po.secinfo.com”).  If you use a mail forwarder, it must support the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), the spam-prevention standard used by Google, Microsoft,
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,
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, the SEC and us, among others.  We do not use
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’s DomainKeys / DKIM.

Q How can I stop receiving e-mail notices of new Filings?Next  Previous
A:  The bottom of each notice contains a “To cease new-Filing notifications to this mailbox, click here...” link that you can click on, which will do one of three things:
1:  Take you to our Stop New-Filing E-Mail Notifications page, where you can cease notifications.
2:  Automatically turn off all new-Filing notifications, if you have never signed up for our service (but someone else in your organization requested that you receive the new-Filing notifications).
3:  Take you to our Not Found page, if your e-mail reader truncated or broke the link in the e-mail notice.  In this case, you will have to manually copy & paste all of it into your browser.

Alternatively, you can Sign In and go to your User Info page.  It has a section named My New-Filing E-Mail Notifications, with links for Registrants (to cease notifications) and Filing/Form Types (to add or cease notifications).

Q My e-mail address has changed.  How can I update it for signing in here?Next  Previous
A:  Sign In with your old e-mail address.  Then, click on your name or User Info at the top.  On your User Information page, click on “Change Your User Information”, and update it.

Q When looking at lists of Filings, is there a description of how “Find Words” works?Next  Previous
A:  Yes.  Our “Find Words in Filings” feature is powerful.  For full details, please click here.

Q Can a company put a direct link on their site to their info on your site?Next  Previous
A:  Yes, please do so.  We offer this as a valuable Investor Relations service.  Just follow these simple steps:
1:  Sign In to our service and find the Registrant page for your company.
2:  When you get to your company’s Registrant page, note the URL in the Address/Location line of your Web browser.  (Using Microsoft as an example, the URL for its Registrant page is:  https://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Registrant.asp?CIK=789019 )
3:  Copy the URL for your Registrant page (with your SEC CIK number) and paste it into a link at your site.  The link will look something like this (again using Microsoft as an example):

<a href="https://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Registrant.asp?CIK=789019">SEC Info</a>

In lieu of just SEC Info as your link text, you can say whatever you want for users to click on, provided that somewhere in the link text it refers to “SEC Info” and/or “www.secinfo.com”.  Alternatively, you could use our logo, in place of the “SEC Info” text, with this image link:

<a href="https://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Registrant.asp?CIK=789019" target="_blank">
<img src="https://www.secinfo.com/Images/SecInfo.135x42.gif"
width=135 height=42 border=0 alt="SEC Info" title="SEC Info..."/></a>

Q How can I correct or delete information that is in your database?Next  Previous
A:  Our Change Policy:
Corrections↓ – Deletions↓ – Redactions↓ – Social Security Numbers↓ – SSNs and Search Engines

Background:  SEC Filings are published on our site within seconds after being released and disseminated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  These Filings, made by SEC-registered Filers (Registrants) pursuant to Federal law, contain SGML-tagged metadata and Documents that are forever in the “public domain” as a result of being filed.  Our software parses them for information in order to update our database and to convert some of their static text into HTML links, but does not change their contents.  We publish the names of the Filer(s), Issuer and their 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.  The file-formats of the individual Documents (Plain Text, HTML, PDF, XML, et al.) and how various Web browsers render them will differ, but the textual content is not changed.  For example, this SEC-Certified Attestation (PDF) attests to the authenticity of the contents of this Filing (HTML).

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 website) 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 websites 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 website is not the PDS.  SEC employees manage their website, 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 website.  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.  (The SEC makes clear the concept of “Filer beware” with respect to this.)  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.  It is also important to recognize that the EDGAR® System operates independently of and separately from all websites, 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 website 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 nominal 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 billion+ 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,
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, et al.) using the Sitemaps protocol.

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AboutPrivacyRedactionsHelp — Tue., Mar. 19, 5:46:18.0am ET