Diligence tool
Has the SEC ever sent this company a comment letter?
Comment letters are private correspondence between SEC staff and a company about its filings — released on EDGAR about 20 business days after the fact, under form types almost nobody knows to look for. Type a ticker for a free count and date, or get the $19 report: every letter, who sent it, a severity flag, and a plain-English read of what it actually says.
One-time payment, no account. Data comes straight from SEC EDGAR — this checks public correspondence filings, not anything private or insider.
Frequently asked
What is an SEC comment letter?
After a company files a 10-K or 10-Q, SEC staff can privately send questions or objections about the accounting or disclosure — filed on EDGAR as form type UPLOAD (the SEC's letter to the company) and CORRESP (the company's response). Companies exchange these letters directly with the SEC; the letters themselves aren't announced or pushed to anyone.
Is this real-time information?
No — and we want to be upfront about that. Comment letters are only released publicly on EDGAR roughly 20 business days after the correspondence closes. This tool is diligence on something that already happened, not a live alert or an information edge over other investors.
Why would this matter to me as an investor?
Academic research on SEC comment letters has found that severe ones — flagging things like restatements, material weakness, or going-concern doubt — tend to precede negative reactions from investors who do read them, largely because almost nobody does. Reading a company's actual correspondence with its regulator is a genuinely underused piece of diligence, even after the fact.
Couldn't I just search EDGAR myself for free?
Yes, the underlying filings are public and EDGAR's own full-text search can find them if you search by form type. The value here isn't secret data — it's not needing to know UPLOAD/CORRESP form types exist in the first place, a ticker-in/plain-English-out report instead of a legal-research interface, and a consistent severity score across every letter for a company instead of reading raw correspondence yourself.
What counts as a 'severe' letter?
We score the extracted text of each letter for specific language: material weakness, restatement, non-reliance, and going concern are scored HIGH; revenue recognition, internal control over financial reporting, and SAB 99 are scored MEDIUM. A huge share of real letters are boilerplate — "we have completed our review" with no finding at all — and we flag those honestly as low-substance rather than manufacturing a severity score that isn't there.
What if a company has zero comment letters?
That's a real, mildly reassuring result, and we say so plainly — it means no publicly filed SEC staff review correspondence exists for that ticker. It isn't proof nothing was ever raised informally, and it doesn't cover history from before EDGAR's coverage window, but it's a genuine data point.
Is this investment advice?
No. This is an automated keyword scan of public SEC correspondence, not a certified accounting opinion or a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Read the original letter before acting on a HIGH or MEDIUM flag.