Several Goldman Sachs Group Inc. leaders have sold stock since February, and the details should be easily searchable on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar website.
They’re not.
While Goldman Sachs makes such filings available on its website, the SEC’s dedicated web page for the company’s insider transactions fails to display seven that have been submitted since Feb. 21. They include Chief of Staff John Rogers’s $4.17 million share sale on Aug. 8 and board member David Viniar’s exercise of 100,000 stock options a week earlier.
The error, spotted by Bloomberg News days after the SEC said that hackers had accessed market-moving information last year, is among myriad flaws plaguing the regulator’s Edgar database. Though the Form 4 filings aren’t visible on the Edgar page that’s supposed to list them, they can still be found with a keyword search on Google, through third-party data providers including Bloomberg LP as well as on Goldman’s website.
SEC Hack Threatens a Bedrock of U.S. Capitalism: Transparency
It’s not the first time that Goldman Sachs’s Form 4s have failed to display on Edgar. Last year, the same web page was temporarily shut down after a Bloomberg reporter notified SEC staff that scores of such filings were missing. Judy Burns, a spokeswoman for the regulator, had no immediate comment on the latest glitch and Goldman’s Leslie Shribman declined to comment.
The SEC receives as many as 800,000 entries each year, or about 3,000 every weekday. While some filings are vetted by staff, Form 4s are rarely if ever reviewed by the regulator before they’re made public, a person briefed on the matter said earlier this year.
The agency, responding to questions about last year’s hack attack, contends that the sheer volume of daily filings makes it impossible to review everything, so it holds companies and individuals responsible for the accuracy of postings.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.