MANDATORY DATA TAGGING ADDED TO SEC MEETING AGENDA

The SEC announced that the agenda for its May 21 open meeting will include amendments to require filing of mutual fund risk/return summary information in interactive data format. Currently, XBRL data tagging has been voluntary and a few firms have utilized the meta-tagging system. The SEC has forecasted that mandatory XBRL was coming. Now that the SEC is close to finalizing the summary prospectus, it has paved the way to require XBRL data tagging of the summary prospectus’s data elements. In a recent speech, Chairman Cox gushed, “What’s really exciting about the summary prospectus is what investors will be able to do with it online. This is the first SEC disclosure document that has really been engineered for the Internet, with individual investors in mind…Combined with interactive data, the new summary information and vertical search capability will allow investors to instantly get that same information for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of funds in order to do quick and easy comparisons.”

OUR TAKE: If you haven’t already lined up a technology or a vendor to XBRL tag your summary prospectus data elements, it’s time to start looking.

http://www.sec.gov/news/openmeetings/2008/ssamtg051408-itemdate.htm http://www.sec.gov/news/speech/2008/spch043008cc.htm