As many of you may have seen or heard, on December 14th, 2020, the SEC will release EDGAR version 20.4, and with it includes many official EFM changes, such as some new form and exhibit types, new filing values for certain forms, and some new XBRL® tagging requirements. The good news here is those items have already been integrated into our platform. Additional information on the tagging items and “unofficial changes” can be found below.

XBRL tagging changes

While Workiva platform had been already been providing an alert for this element, the new EFM Vol II version 56 will now validate for “IcfrAuditorAttestationFlag".  A check box indicating whether an ICFR Auditor Attestation is included in a filing is required for annual reports. The concept “IcfrAuditorAttestationFlag” should be applied to the cover page for issuers filing annual reports with Inline XBRL (see example below).

Note that NOT tagging this fact will create SEC warnings but will not prevent a filing itself.

In addition, we wanted to provide an update in regards to a change that should be made to annual cover page tagging for 10-Ks, 10-KTs, 20-Fs and 40-Fs filings. The “CurrentFiscalYearEndDate”*, currently located within the DEI (non-printing) section, should now be tagged directly on the cover page. This concept should be applied as an additional fact to the “For the fiscal year ended” date disclosed on the cover that currently utilizes the element “DocumentPeriodEndDate” (see example below).

“Unofficial changes” in EDGAR release

Historically, we have seen "unofficial" system changes be included in these anticipated EDGAR releases. These are changes that do not appear in the provided release notes. More importantly, though, they have caused problems in previous releases, most recently being the filing issues seen earlier this year with how EDGAR supported session IDs.

We have been moving forward and planning for such type of changes and their potential impact. As of now, some of these “unofficial changes” have been backed down from the EDGAR 20.4 release (the session IDs item, specifically) but as always there’s no guarantee that there may not be other items that could cause a temporary hiccup in the roll-out of this release. We’ll be keeping an eye on things the morning of December 14th to get these changes into our platform ASAP. 

What’s our plan?

As part of our high level of ongoing service and partner in your success, we want to reassure you that Workiva is working tirelessly to anticipate these changes to EDGAR and incorporating them into our platform. Since Workiva is a cloud-based software, we are able to quickly adapt to these changes, unlike a traditional software that may require IT work. However, with the lack of a testing environment from the SEC, it will be difficult to predict these changes until they are fully released on Monday, December 14th

We’ll be working quickly on Dec. 14th to ensure a smooth transition of the EDGAR 20.4 release, and will continue to provide updates as we have more information. We will also publish those changes in our release notes as well, so stay tuned there for sure.

In the meantime, let us know what questions you have, or if you need any assistance. Thanks again, and have a great day!