On April 5, 2012, we began to accept and process draft registration statements for confidential, non-public review submitted by Emerging Growth Companies pursuant to Section 106 of the JOBS Act.  In May, we also harmonized the non-public review process for certain foreign private issuers’ initial public offerings with the process in place for confidential draft registration statements filed by EGCs.  Since May 14, both types of submissions have been delivered to the SEC via a secure email system, with a number of issuers taking advantage of the confidential or non-public review opportunities.

We intend to replace this secure email system with an EDGAR-based system for confidential and non-public submission of draft registration statements, and in fact, some of the necessary modifications will be in place in the next release of EDGAR (Release 12.1) beginning July 2, 2012. However, we are still working to implement the EDGAR-based system, and therefore companies should continue to use the secure email system currently in place until further notice. We expect to announce in the near future that the new EDGAR functionality is available, and will provide instructions on how to use the new system at that time. 

June 28, 2012