While infrequent Central Index Keys (CIKs) can change when registrants undergo various entity restructurings. For example, when Oracle Systems acquired Siebel Systems in 2006 a restructuring led to a new entity named Oracle Corporation with a new CIK where Oracle Corporation was a holding corporation and Oracle Systems became a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation. However, Oracle Systems was considered the predecessor and Oracle Corporation the successor entity. If you are collecting data from some other source and want to match to SEC filings the time series will be interrupted if you have only one of the two CIKs.

To address this issue we maintain a mapping system that relates the identifiable CIKs for entities that undergo these type of changes. When you want to use CIK Filtering you are given an option to use Historical CIKs as well by selecting the check-box on the Set CIK Filter interface.

First, to make sure you have the most recent mapping file, from File select Options.

From the left panel of the Options control select Update Historical CIK and then hit the Perform Update button.

After hitting the Perform Update button the application will retrieve the latest version of the file from our server and save it in the appropriate directory for future use. This does not need to done often – perhaps every six-months.

To illustrate this, I will use CIK filtering to find all proxy statements filed by Oracle (CIK: 1341439) assuming that I have some data from an alternate source that used that CIK as an identifier field. The image below shows that I have pasted CIK 1341439 into the CIK Filter interface.

I hit the Okay button and then ran my search. When the search was complete the application reported that 18 documents were found, the oldest though was filed in 2006.

That would seem odd since Oracle has been around for some time. That is the problem this feature is designed to address. If we run the search again, this time selecting the Include Historical CIKs button as illustrated in the next image:

The application will return all 30 proxies filed (on EDGAR) by both Oracle Systems and Oracle Corporation.

A limitation of this is that we don’t have a way to communicate to you what CIKs were added to your CIK list for the filtering process. However, you can get a current list of the mappings we are using by using the Query Datebases feature to save all of the mappings in our archive into a CSV file. To do so, open the Query Databases tool, select the CIK_MAPPING database and hit the Execute button.

Once the list is loaded use the Save Results button to save it as a csv file.

It is important to recognize that this feature is designed only to link those cases where the old CIK is considered a legal predecessor and the new CIK is considered a legal successor. For example, Siebel Systems is not the predecessor to Oracle. Perhaps a more on-point example, old GM (CIK:40730) is not the predecessor to General Motors (CIK: 1467858). Our mapping will not return filings for Motors Liquidation (the current name of CIK 40730).