CFO SEARCH

We were recently awarded a grant to study the views of CFO's regarding the costs and benefits of Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404.  Part of the grant was to fund a survey of 2,500 CFOs of publicly traded companies.  We needed to first identify those companies it was appropriate to survey.  Section 404 has/had a phased in effective period, so our survey was only appropriate for what the SEC called Accelerated Filers.  Then we needed to identify the CFO by name to increase our response rate.  A complete description of the search process is available here: cfosearch.htm

AUDITOR CHANGE

Another study we are working on involved identifying the reason for the auditor change at all banks with available data on Compustat.  Because of very specific data requirements we needed to review each report of an auditor change and code the disclosure based on the nature of the change (dismissal versus resignation), the existence of reportable events, whether a press release was made about the event and identify all confounding events reported with the auditor change.  Here is an outline of the steps we followed to find the filings for our study BANKAUCHNG.htm

BOILERPLATE

A common search problem is when the search terms are associated with text that is essentially boilerplate.  For example, every Accelerated Filer should make a filing at least once each quarter that uses the phrase Material Weakness since this phrase is often reported in the CEO/CFO certifications required by Sarbanes-Oxley.  A researcher trying to identify all companies that reported a material weakness cannot  simply design a search that excludes all documents where both the phrase Material Weakness and the term Certification are found. Because of filing peculiarities a search structured in that manner will miss a significant number of filings that actually report on Material Weaknesses.  DirectEDGAR was designed to overcome this common problem so at to avoid overwhelming the researcher with irrelevant results: boilerplate.htm