SEC Announces Successor to EDGAR Database

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Christopher Cox has unveiled the successor to the agency’s 1980s-era EDGAR database, which will give investors far faster and easier access to key financial information about public companies and mutual funds. The decision to replace EDGAR marks the SEC's transition from collecting forms and documents to making the information itself freely available to investors to give them better and more up-to-date financial disclosure in a form they can readily use. The new system is called IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications. Based on a completely new architecture being built from the ground up, it will at first supplement and then eventually replace the EDGAR system. (Read the SEC's On-Line News Release which includes links to a video demonstration of IDEA.)