I should begin by noting that the error I describe below does not appear to be an EDGAR system error. My current hypothesis is that it arose from an error in, or use of, a filing-agent software portal.

Periodically, we design new tests to validate our assignment of PERSON-CIKs to director and executive-compensation data. Our most recent test compared the PERSON-CIKs assigned in our normalized data to the person names as they appeared in the original tables. The goal was simple: identify cases where the same person name, within the same filer, had been associated with more than one PERSON-CIK.

Out of more than 400,000 rows, the test identified roughly 800 review cases. Overwhelmingly, most of these cases were benign: the SEC identifier was unavailable in an earlier year but became available in a later year. But one case involving SRAX, Inc. raised a more interesting issue.

One of the cases that turned up was for executive compensation as reported by SRAX (CIK 1538217). They hired a gentleman named Michael Malone in January 2019 as their CFO (they did not file an 8-K announcing that hiring so I can’t provide the exact date). There was a Form 3 filed on behalf (or by) Mr. Malone using the CIK 1763028 on 1/4/2019. While they report hiring him in January 2019, the Form 3 suggests he was granted an equity interest on 12/15/2018. But that is not the error that interested me.

A Form 4 was filed on January 4, 2022 using the name Michael Malone with a new CIK (1525225), the transactions described in the Form 4 seem to align with information about transactions with Mr. Malone described in a couple of their filings. The Form 4 can be accessed here (Form 4).

We collected compensation data and during a review process for EC normalization from a 10-K filing made in 2024 (for their 12/31/2022 FYE) someone had to assign the PERSON-CIK to a row of data regarding Mr. Malone’s compensation. One of the resources they would have had available was our internal tool for this data – this is a screenshot of the owner-filing details from their EDGAR landing page.

A reasonable person would conclude that the company replaced their CFO with another with a similar name, this would be very unusual but well within the realm of possibility. We assigned the CIK 1525225 to that row of data. As a result of that assignment, that row and prior rows (from prior filings) were in conflict when I tested them today so they were returned from the database. I had two people with the same name but different PERSON-CIK.

Initially, I thought this was a rare case of a person changing their CIK (I identified two others during this process). I was seeking some confirmation of that when I was looking at the landing page for MALONE MICHAEL – here is a screenshot of his insider transactions list (the link associated with Get insider transactions for this reporting owner).

I originally thought that this was unusual, that a person served as a director before serving as an officer. But nothing looked untoward. However, as I reviewed the filings associated with the two PERSON-CIKs, that hypothesis became increasingly difficult to support. The individual associated with PERSON-CIK 1525225 had a filing history that reflected service as a director of Intellicheck and Environmental Tectonics Corporation, while the executive compensation disclosures from SRAX described a 37-year-old Chief Financial Officer who joined the company in January 2019. Although none of these facts alone disproved the hypothesis, taken together they painted two very different professional histories. It became increasingly clear that these were not two PERSON-CIKs belonging to the same individual—they were two different individuals who happened to share the name Michael Malone.

Once I concluded that these were two different individuals, the focus of the investigation changed. The evidence consistently pointed to Michael D. Malone (PERSON-CIK 1763028) as the SRAX Chief Financial Officer and so I have to correct the record in our executive compensation table where we matched the compensation data to Michael Malone (PERSON-CIK 1525225). The remaining question was not who the executive was, but how a Form 4 reporting SRAX ownership transactions came to be associated with PERSON-CIK 1525225, which appears to belong to a different Michael Malone. I cannot answer that question definitively. My current hypothesis is that the error originated during the filing preparation process rather than within EDGAR itself. Both SRAX and Intellicheck used the same EDGAR filing agent, EDGAR Agents, LLC (filing-agent CIK 1493152), and that filing agent appears throughout the filing histories of both companies. The only explanation I can come up with is that when the filing was prepared the incorrect reporting owner was selected from the filing agent’s software or internal database, causing the transaction to be filed under the wrong Michael Malone. If that hypothesis is correct, the error originated before the filing reached EDGAR and was then faithfully preserved in the public record.

This does beg the question, how often does this error occur? And then clearly, why was it not corrected? Unfortunately, I can understand why Michael Malone (CIK 1525225) did not respond to the filing as he passed away in 2019.

I reported above that my original hypothesis was that the person had multiple PERSON-CIKs. I identified several cases where that occurred. For example CIKs 1060892 & 1740487 belong to a Mr. Tompkins (with a unique name form associated with each CIK). After reviewing a number of filings the only conclusion that I think is possible is that they are the same person. Thus, for these cases I have decided to change how we report their PERSON-CIK. Our practice will be to concatenate the two CIKs with a dash between them. We will order the CIKs in ascending order. So the PERSON-CIK that will be associated with Mr. Tompkins will be 1060892-1740487. I suspect we will need to propagate that change to the insider trading data but it will be a bit before we do so. I found four cases of switches.

Another interesting type of case that we identified were SEC name changes. I don’t think we are going to do anything about those. For example, have some compensation data from Rhythm Pharmaceuticals associated with Jennifer Lee and some with Jennifer Chien. As you can see from the screenshot below these are the same person. Ms. Chien/Lee changed her name to Lee for her SEC filings in February 2023 and the company began using her Lee surname in filings the same year. Our reliance on the PERSON-CIK as the primary identifier keeps us from having to search for these name changes.