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# Other

# Final Data Quality Assurance Guidelines 

                            May 12, 2017                       

The Commission is committed to updating its Information Quality Guidelines consistent with OMB Memorandum M-19-15. The updates will include updated criteria for identifying “influential information” and a new timeframe for responding to requests for correction. The Guideline updates will be posted to this webpage.

## Introduction

Section 515 of the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (Public Law 106-554; H.R. 5658) ("Appropriations Act") directed the Office of Management and Budget ("OMB") to issue guidance to federal agencies on: (i) publishing their own guidelines for ensuring and maximizing the quality of information disseminated by federal agencies; and (ii) establishing administrative mechanisms allowing affected persons to seek and obtain, where appropriate, correction of information that does not comply with OMB or the agencies' information quality guidelines. Under the guidelines issued by OMB (the "Government-wide Guidelines"),1 all federal agencies subject to the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA)2 are required to publish on their websites data quality assurance guidelines.

In accordance with the Government-wide Guidelines, the Commission has developed the following guidelines. These guidelines do not create a new mechanism for addressing policy decisions made by the Commission; rather, they describe the agency's internal procedures for ensuring and maximizing the quality of certain types of information disseminated by the Commission. In addition, they provide an administrative mechanism for correcting, when appropriate, information that does not comply with the Government-wide Guidelines or the Commission's guidelines.

Please note that the Commission's data quality guidelines:
                                - Are not a regulation and do not change any existing regulatory requirements or trigger any regulatory obligations;  
                                - Do not create any legal rights or impose any legally binding requirements or obligations on the Commission or the public;  
                                - Do not affect any otherwise available judicial review of agency action; and  
                                - May be revised periodically

## Definitions

For purposes of the Commission's data quality assurance guidelines, the following terms will have the meanings below. These definitions follow or are derived from the Government-wide Guidelines. Consistent with the Government-wide Guidelines, we have adapted OMB's definitions in ways appropriate to the Commission's particular practices and programs.

## Data Quality Assurance Guidelines

The Commission's guidelines reflect its procedures for reviewing and substantiating information to maximize the quality, including the objectivity, utility and integrity, of information before it is disseminated. In accordance with the Government-wide Guidelines, the level of quality assurance appropriate for information varies according to the relative importance of the information and the costs and benefits of requiring additional assurances for the particular information. The Commission's guidelines follow.

### Basic Principles

### General Categories of Information Subject to the Guidelines

### Information Outside the Scope of the Guidelines

Based on OMB's definitions of "dissemination" and "information," several types of information disseminated by the Commission and members of the Commission staff do not fall under these guidelines. Excluded categories include:
                                - Distributions intended to be limited to Commission employees or contractors, such as internal operating procedures, training manuals and requests for proposals.  
                                - Intra- or inter-agency distributions or sharing of government information, such as the Commission's Annual Report, the Commission's annual budget and the Commission's plans and reports pursuant to the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993.  
                                - Opinions of individual Commissioners and staff members, where the author's presentation states that the information is that person's opinion rather than fact or the Commission's views. These include articles, speeches, panel presentations, special studies and academic papers authored by staff members that state that the views expressed in their work are their own views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission.  
                                - Responses to requests for agency records under the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act or other similar law.  
                                - Correspondence with individual entities or persons, including staff comment letters, staff no-action letters, staff interpretive letters and staff deficiency letters.  
                                - Press releases, including litigation releases, the SEC Digest, and similar communications in any media that announce or give notice of information the Commission already has disseminated elsewhere.  
                                - Archival records maintained by the Commission public reference room and libraries.  
                                - Information from third parties, for which the Commission is merely a conduit, such as public filings (both EDGAR and paper filings) and public comment letters. This exclusion includes information that the Commission has not authored or is not distributing in a manner that suggests that the Commission endorses or adopts the information, and the Commission does not indicate in its distribution that it is using or proposing to use the information to formulate or support a regulation, guidance or other Commission decision or position.  
                                - Subpoenas, Commission orders, opinions, amicus briefs and other documents prepared and released in the context of adjudicative processes. Adjudicative processes also include factual allegations by the staff during the investigative and litigation phases of cases brought by the Commission's Division of Enforcement. Because there are well-established procedural safeguards and rights to address the quality of factual allegations and adjudicatory decisions, and to provide persons with an opportunity to contest decisions, these guidelines do not impose any additional requirements on the Commission during adjudicative proceedings and do not provide parties to such adjudicative proceedings any additional rights of challenge or appeal.

### Requests for Correction

The correction process is designed to provide a mechanism for affected persons to seek correction of information disseminated by the agency that does not comply with these and/or the Government-wide guidelines.

This administrative mechanism does not necessarily guarantee a correction in every instance. Rather, the decision of whether a correction is appropriate, and what degree of correction is appropriate, will be determined by the nature, completeness and timeliness of the information involved and any relevant factors such as the significance of the correction on the users of the information and the magnitude of the correction. Responses may be in the form of personal contacts by letter or telephone, form letters, press releases or mass mailings that correct widely disseminated errors or address a frequently raised request. The Commission need not respond substantively to frivolous or repetitive requests for correction, requests that concern information not covered by these guidelines or requests from a person whom the information does not affect.

With respect to proposed rules, the thorough consideration required by the APA process provides an adequate complaint and appeal process. A separate complaint and appeal process for information that is already subject to such a public comment process would be duplicative, burdensome, disruptive to the orderly conduct of the action and unfair to other public commenters who submitted comments during the applicable comment period. Accordingly, the notice and comment process is the exclusive means by which an affected person may address the quality of data in a proposed rulemaking.

In unusual circumstances involving information related to a rulemaking, the Commission may consider an information complaint under these correction procedures to avoid the potential for actual harm or undue delay. These circumstances include situations where: (1) the information is disseminated in advance of the rulemaking and no method is provided for public comment; (2) the agency receives the complaint after the comment period closes and it could not have been submitted earlier; (3) there will be a long delay before the proposed rule becomes final; (4) the information was disseminated for the first time in the final rule; and (5) the principal effect on the complainant is related to the information itself, rather than the rule.

In most instances, matters should be resolved at the appropriate division or office level within the Commission. Novel or highly complex matters may be sent to the Commission for review, at the discretion of the staff. If the matter is resolved at the staff level, the staff will use reasonable efforts to send its response to the requestor within 60 days of the date the office or division received the request. If the resolution of the matter is particularly complicated or would benefit from consultation with other divisions or agencies, the staff will use reasonable efforts to send a response to the requestor within 90 days of the date the original office or division received the request.

**Request Format.**  To be treated as a data quality correction request under these guidelines and to help ensure the most expedient processing of the request, any affected person seeking correction of Commission-disseminated data should submit a request in writing (on paper or by email) and include as much of the following information as possible:
                                - A description of the facts or data the requestor seeks to have corrected;  
                                - An explanation of how the requestor is an affected person with regard to those facts or data;  
                                - The factual basis for believing the facts or data fail to comply with the Government-wide or Commission guidelines;  
                                - A proposed resolution, including the factual basis for believing the facts or data in the requestor's proposed resolution are correct;  
                                - The consequences of not implementing the proposed resolution;  
                                - Any supporting documentation the requestor believes would be helpful in resolving the matter; and  
                                - The requestor's contact information, including name, address, daytime telephone number and email address.

Requests should be marked *"Data Quality Correction Request"* on the first line of the envelope directly above the mailing address and on the correspondence itself, in the case of letters, or in the "Subject" line, in the case of email correspondence. Emails should be sent to the following address: dataquality@sec.gov. Letters should be addressed to:

United States Securities and Exchange CommissionOffice of the SecretaryAttn: Data Quality100 F Street, NEWashington, DC 20549-9303

**Processing Data Quality Correction Requests.**  The Office of the Secretary should route the request to the head of the appropriate division or office within the Commission who should provide that: (i) the request is reviewed; (ii) any appropriate corrective action is taken; and (iii) a response to the request is made.

**Requests for Staff Reconsideration.**  If the requestor does not agree with the response, the requestor may send a request for staff reconsideration of the original response. To help ensure the most expedient processing of the request, the request should be postmarked (or, in the case of email, date-stamped) within 20 days of the date of the initial response, or 90 days after delivery of the original request, whichever is later. The request for staff reconsideration should include a copy of the original request, a copy of the original response (if in writing) or a summary of the response (if oral), and a statement describing why the response to the original complaint did not comply with the data quality guidelines or why the requestor disagrees with the original response.

Reconsideration requests should be marked *"Request for Staff Reconsideration of Data Quality Correction"* on the first line of the envelope directly above the mailing address and on the correspondence itself, in the case of letters, or in the "Subject" line, in the case of email correspondence. Emails should be sent to the following address: dataquality@sec.gov. Letters should be addressed to:

United States Securities and Exchange CommissionOffice of the SecretaryAttn: Data Quality100 F Street, NEWashington, DC 20549-9303

**Processing Staff Reconsideration Requests.**  The Office of the Secretary should route the staff reconsideration request to the Office of the Chief Counsel ("OCC") of the division or office that received the original request. If the OCC was involved in making the decision on the original request, or in producing the data that is the subject matter of the request, or if the division or office does not have an OCC, then the staff reconsideration request will be assigned to another objective official. The OCC or the designated official may seek the advice and counsel of other appropriate officials in rendering the decision. The OCC or the designated official should review the original response, determine if additional action is appropriate, and use reasonable efforts to send the staff's response to the reconsideration request within 30 days of the date the OCC or designated official received the request.

### Effective Dates

These information quality guidelines will become effective on October 1, 2002. As provided in the Government-wide Guidelines, these guidelines apply only to information disseminated on or after October 1, 2002 regardless of when it was first disseminated. The fact that information disseminated by the Commission before this date is still maintained by the Commission (e.g., in publications the Commission continues to distribute on a website) does not make the information subject to these guidelines or to the request for correction process.

***Privacy Act Statement.**  The Commission is authorized to collect the information provided by the requestor under the Appropriations Act. The information is needed to process each request and to allow the Commission to reply appropriately. The requestor is not required to furnish the information, but failure to do so may prevent the request from being processed. The principal use is to process and respond to the request, but the Commission may disclose information to a Congressional office, to the Department of Justice, a court or other tribunal when the information is relevant and necessary to litigation, or to a contractor or another federal agency to help accomplish a function related to these guidelines.*

***Paperwork Reduction Act.**  The Commission will make use of the OMB's Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) clearance process to help improve the quality of information that the Commission collects and disseminates to the public. The Commission is already required to demonstrate in its PRA submissions to OMB the "practical utility" of a proposed collection of information. For all proposed collections of information that will be disseminated to the public, the Commission will consider whether the proposed collection of information will result in information that will be collected, maintained, and used in a way consistent with the Government-wide and Commission guidelines.*

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