When the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission publishes its views on some financial reporting topic, public companies and auditors typically flock to those comments and pore over every word, looking for any guidance they might offer to help the companies’ own financial reporting and auditing.
Those comment letters, dutifully published in the SEC’s EDGAR database, now number in the tens of thousands and have evolved into a treasure trove of guidance. According to Mark Cheffers, chief executive of Audit Analytics, as many as 60,000 letters written by SEC staff to public companies now sit on the SEC Web site, available to all.
