Talk of the paperless office are likely to evince a hollow laugh from the average office manager, but computers are reducing the the rate at which paper generation increases – here at Computergram for instance, at least a third of the items originate from material received electronically, which simply travel from computer to computer for distribution and editing, and never see paper until the completed Computergram is printed out. And the paperless Securities & Exchange Commission really is on the way at last. The Commission’s Edgar Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system has had a troubled genesis, but since the BDM Corp unit of Ford Motor Co was called in in 1989 and given a $52m multi-year contract to clear up the mess (CI No 1,088), progress has been reasonably smooth and the day is now in sight when companies will be required to submit all their filings to the Commission – 10Q quarterly, 10K year-end mandatory filings of the vital statistics of their businesses, filings for permission to make offers of shares or bonds straight into the Edgar system from an MS-DOS personal computer. Prospectuses will still have to be printed to sell the shares of course, but the mountain of paper that the Commission has to store and to make available to those that want to see it will be a thing of the past. And it’s good news for companies too, because as General Motors Corp, already filing electronically under the Edgar trial, told the Wall Street Journal, the company is now able to make changes to documents right up to the last minute rather than suffer an in-built delay during which something might come up that they really wanted to change but couldn’t. The service – built around Stratus Computer Inc processors – will be made available to professionals and to the public via Mead Corp’s Mead Data Central Lexis and Nexis database services. It will cost a daunting $36,000 a year for New York Stock Exchange filings alone, but the Commission will, as now, make filings available at public reference rooms in New York and Chicago – but instead of having to sort through mounds of paper searching for what they want, journalists and other interested parties will access the data from terminals. The 225 firms now filing to the trial system will move to the permanent system early next year, and another 800 to 1,000 companies should come on during the year. Companies will then be added quarterly until by 1995 most of the 11,500 or so US public companies should be filing returns to the system.
