SEC: EDGAR Dissemination Update

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the concerns of the Taxpayers Assets Project (TAP) regarding public access to the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system. GAO noted that: (1) SEC believes that its information dissemination strategy should result in reasonable prices to the public for EDGAR data; (2) SEC dissemination should provide adequate competition among other commercial information providers; and (3) SEC is exploring the feasibility and cost of providing data in compact disc-read only memory (CD-ROM) and floppy disk formats.