At the risk of overstating the obvious, the Securities and Exchange Commission is reminding companies to send a signed audit report when they complete filings through the EDGAR system. Seriously.

The Center for Audit Quality sent an alert to its members saying the CAQ's SEC Regulations Committee received a communiqué from the staff of the SEC. The message was something like: Please remind auditors that the SEC still requires issuers to include a signed audit report with their EDGAR filings.

The CAQ alert continues by citing chapter and verse: Rule 2-02(a) of Regulation S-X requires the audit firm signature on each audit report, and Item 302 of Regulation S-T provides additional requirements regarding signatures in typed format on electronic submissions. Pete Bible, a partner with audit firm Amper, Politziner & Mattia and a member of the SEC Regs committee, said the SEC staff apparently has received one too many filings where the inclusion of the audit firm name or signature was overlooked before the filing was sent.

“For registrants that file on EDGAR, they need to get signed audit opinions for their files,” he says. “Believe it or not, in the heat of the battle, some have not.” In most cases, it's a matter of forgetting to include the name of the firm in the electronic filing, he says, but some companies have forgotten to include the report entirely.

So now the SEC means business. The CAQ wrote to its members: “The SEC staff believes that readers should be able to easily determine the name of the firm that audited the financial statements and therefore will request amendments for any filings that do not comply with the Commission's requirements.” So audit partners are encouraged to take a final look at the audit report before it is sent to spare any unnecessary wrath from the SEC.